Seedrs Raises £10 Million with £6 Million via Self Crowdfunding Round

By CrowdFund Insider

Seedrs, one of the leading UK based investment crowdfunding platforms, has closed on £10 million in funding with £4 million coming from Woodford Investment Management and the balance coming from retails investors via their own platform. The deal was announced earlier this month with Seedrs garnering a pre-money £40 million valuation.

Seedrs reported that over 2,000 of its customers and community invested in the business coming from 35 different countries. The average individual investment was £3,200 and the largest individual investment was £800,000 with the highest number of investors coming from the UK, Germany, Portugal, France and Italy. The investment now values Seedrs at £50 million on a fully-diluted, post-money basis. Seedrs said that advisory board member Andy Murray exercised his pre-emption rights investing into the campaign

Seedrs CEO Jeff Kelisky, commented on the successful round;

“We are delighted to have received over £6 million investment from over 2,000 of our customers and community. It was highly important to us that we could open up as much as possible for our existing investor base, and this sum, combined with Woodford’s investment of £4 million earlier this month takes us to £10 million. This round is yet more evidence of the market’s conviction that Seedrs is on the right path to delivering shareholder value by opening venture capital opportunities to retail investors for fast growth companies – and without Seedrs having pioneered regulated equity investment, these opportunities would have remained closed to them.”

Andy Murray also released a statement on the Seedrs self-crowdfunding campaign;

“It is with great pride that I have made this investment into Seedrs latest funding round. As an active investor into early stage businesses through the Seedrs platform, it was important for me to take up my pre-emption rights. I have made a substantial follow on investment into this round to show my support for all that Seedrs has achieved since the last raise in 2015. The team has done some great work in supporting European startups and I’m looking forward to seeing how the business will continue to grow with this additional investment.”

As reported earlier, Seedrs will use the  capital raised for new product capabilities that are said to materially increase liquidity and return potential for investors and businesses; build out increased sales and marketing efforts, launch a select set of strategic partnerships, and massively scale campaign execution through automation, machine learning and AI.

Since platform launch, Seedrs has funded over 530 deals with more than £260 million invested into campaigns on the platform, with the last 12 months seeing an aggressive ramp up in activity including:

Other recent activity includes:

• The launch of their Secondary Market in May 2017, from which some investors have realised up to 19x returns on their investments
• Becoming the sole equity crowdfunding platform appointed to the Royal Bank of Scotland Capital Connections Program
• Being named the most active investor in UK private companies by independent research agency Beauhurst in February 2017
• Publishing its inaugural Portfolio Update, a groundbreaking move for the space in Autumn 2016. Landmark analysis shows that on a fair value basis as of 30 September 2016, investing through Seedrs has produced better annualised rates of return (IRRs) than most other asset classes with platform-wide IRR increases from 14.44% to 49.1% when impacts of SEIS and EIS tax reliefs are taken into account.