Why we have chosen to crowdfund with Crowdcube?

Let me start off, by saying how excited I am, for MarketsFlow to be going live with Crowdcube today. As I write this, having had just a few hours of sleep, and a long day ahead of all of us at MarketsFlow, we feel privileged to be part of Crowdcube and to be crowdfunding!

The last 2 years, have been the most exciting period of my life, with the birth of an idea – seeding it, and then nurturing it daily and growing it from the seed, to what MarketsFlow is today.

Travelling to New York and picking up an award for Best Broker-dealer research awards, was very emotional moment for me, in February this year. And then, having 2 meetings at the headquarters of JP Morgan at 270 Park Avenue, discussing MarketsFlow’s Portfolio optimisation tool, as a potential for Chase digital offering. My visit in May to Amsterdam to meet with, a boutique Asset Management bank, which was interested in acquiring our platform at such an early stage. Whilst one of them is still in progress, and the other shelved due to the timing and corporate re-structuring, they have been very reassuring for me that, MarketsFlow is here to stay, and will change people’s lives in a major way.

And this leads me on to the next chapter, where we need to grow, ambitiously but cautiously in the UK first, and then later in the US. To do so, we looked at a number of options, including VCs. We met a prominent VC in London, who told us that they had missed out Nutmeg deal, and were very keen on us, and would be keeping a check on us for Series A.

We had interest from angels, Corporate Finance people and then crowdfunding platforms – Syndicate Room and Crowdcube, and some others.

Frankly, I had always loved the idea of crowdfunding, I think it is one of the most revolutionary concepts in modern finance and funding in specific. Funding, has always been at the heart of enterprise from rail-road innovation to Internet inception. Now opening, funding to investors in such an accessible way, in my opinion will change the future for new innovators. Needless to say, it will also create an amazing potential opportunities for investors within the secondary market for unlisted companies.

In short, I am a firm believer in crowdfunding and have invested myself in a few startups, who I think are changing today, for better tomorrow.

I deeply love the fact, that with crowdunfing, investors can share in the growth, evolution, and also inherently market the business. This is more evident than ever, with businesses like Monzo, Revolut and more recently Chip. Such loyalty is priceless, and is only possible due to the innovation in crowdfunding.

Now that we had established, crowdfunding is amazing and has huge benefits for businesses and investors, there was the mere question of share issuance. After some initial discussions with legal, and crowfunding, I was pleasantly surprised to find a great nominee structure which would benefit us, and our shareholders. So we opted to go for nominee structure for investments raised up until £25K, and ordinary shareholding for investors above £25K. In both cases, all shareholders would have equal rights, and with optimised cap table.

With that, the decision of a choice of platform was kind of easy. I loved both of the teams at Syndicate Room and Crowdcube. Syndicate Room, have a lovely office in Cambridge and the people are amazing. They have had great traction with most businesses and their own fund which co-invests. At 4% Fintech is a growing area for their overall portfolio.

Crowdcube on the other hand, are equally amazing people, and have changed the investing landscape for everyone – businesses and investors. I remember watching Darren and Luke, early on as founders seeking advice on CNBC from James Caan on their own fund-raising to grow rapidly. And boy, have they come a long way!

And then there was the traction story, I was amazed at what Monzo, Revolut, WiseAlpha and Freetrade had achieved at Crowdcube. More importantly, these firms had not simply acquired investors, but they had acquired the future ambassadors of their businesses. And that again is priceless.

So, the decision for us to go with Crowdcube was made easy. We like Crowdcube and we like the crowd, in fact we are part of the crowd , as we exist to change the investing habits of tomorrow’s crowd!

Thank you for reading!

Tom

Risk Warning: Any financial performance figures refer to the past and that past performance is not a reliable indicator of or forms a guarantee for future results. For detailed Risk Warning click here.