UK

Seedrs Shares Available in Equity Crowdfunding Campaign on Friday

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Seedrs LogoSeedrs, one of the tow biggest equity crowdfunding platforms in the UK (and probably in the world), has announced that it will open a new campaign offering shares to the crowd on Friday. To bid in the pitch and become a shareholder, interested investors need to register at the Seedrs website first and then wait for the campaign to open on Friday.

Jeff Lynn, CEO of Seedrs said:

Last month Seedrs announced its £10 million Series A round led by Woodford Patient Capital Trust and Augmentum Capital. As we explained, we have set aside £2.5 million of that round for existing shareholders and new investors to invest through a campaign on the Seedrs platform. …

The campaign will go live to members of our Leedrs Club (the group of our most active investors) at 9:00 am this Friday, 21st August, and it will then go live to all investment-authorised members at 12:00 pm the same day. … Investments will be accepted on a first-come, first-served basis, and although you will have several days to make payment after investing, we would suggest [investors] transfer any funds [they] wish to invest sooner rather than later.

Please note that by the time the campaign opens on Friday, a significant proportion of the £2.5 million will already have been taken up by existing shareholders exercising their pre-emption rights. We expect, however, that there will still be a good bit of room for new investors, and it is our hope that we will be able to use this opportunity to expand our investor base meaningfully.

I expect that this offer will fill very quickly. The last comparable offer by Crowdcube, Seedrs main competitor, was filled within minutes.

International P2P Lending – Loan Volumes July 2015

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The following table lists the loan originations for July. Zopa originated 52M GBP and takes the lead for that month in Europe. Prosper reached 4 billion US$ in loan origination since inception. I do monitor development of p2p lending figures for many markets. Since I already have most of the data on file I can publish statistics on the monthly loan originations for selected p2p lending services.
Investors living in markets with no or limited choice of local p2p lending services can check this list of marketplaces open to international investors.
International P2P Lending Volume 07 / 2015
Table: P2P Lending Volumes in July 2015. Source: own research
Note that volumes have been converted from local currency to Euro for the sake of comparison. Some figures are estimates/approximations.
*Prosper and Lending Club no longer publish origination data for the most recent month.
Notice to p2p lending services not listed: Continue reading →

Crowdcube Raises 6M from Numis

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Crrowcube LogoUK platform Crowdcube today announced that it has raised 6M GBP of investment to further accelerate its growth. The investment is led by Numis, a UK stockbroker and corporate advisor. Tim Draper and London-based Draper Esprit have also joined this new funding round alongside existing backers Balderton Capital, one of Europe’s largest venture firms.

The investment will enable Crowdcube to accelerate growth, continue the expansion of its team, ramp up new product development including the creation of a new solution for companies going public, and invest further in its acclaimed marketing activities.

‘We’re on a mission to help more businesses raise the finance they need to grow, create jobs and deliver returns to investors. We’ve dominated the democratisation of seed-stage equity investment since we launched in 2011 and we’re determined to do the same for larger businesses. We want to put the Public back into IPO.’ commented Darren Westlake, CEO and co-founder of Crowdcube.

This round puts the Crowdcube at 51M GBP post investment.
Continue reading →

Seedrs Raises 10M Series A

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Seedrs logoUK platform Seedrs has raised a 10 million GBP series A round led by Woodford Patient Capital Trust plc and Augmentum Capital. The capital raised will be used to launch Seedrs in the US market.

Furthermore, Seedrs is to launch a 2.5 million GBP crowd funding campaign to give existing shareholders and new investors the opportunity to participate in the round. The details will be announced later.

Seedrs plans to expand its marketing efforts in the UK and Europe, increase platform development activities and launch its business in the United States.

This Seedrs valuation is now at 30 million GBP on a fully-diluted, post-money basis. I wrote a review of my experiences with investing on Seedrs in March. Continue reading →

Rebuildingsociety offers one Business the First 25K Interest Free

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Rebuilding Society LogoUK p2p lending marketplace Rebuildingsociety currently offers a promotion where one business will receive 25,000 GBP of their loan interest free. Loan applications received until 31 August 2015 will enter into the promotion.

Daniel Rajkumar, CEO of Rebuildingsociety.com, said: ‘Companies seeking loans now have peer-to-peer platforms as a mainstream alternative to the banks and I’m delighted to be giving a 25,000 GBP interest free loan to a business. Businesses seeking loan finance can approach us either through commercial finance brokers or directly and our platform will typically enable viable applications to get finance within 4 weeks.’

Will Funding Circle Expand Into Europe?

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Note: The following is a synopsis from an Funding Circle investor event in London yesterday. I did not attend, therefore it is based on notes that attending investors have published.* I selected only some aspects from these notes, that I found interesting, so the following probably omits many topics from the meeting and is by no means complete.

Funding Circle confirmed that it has been investing own money (approx. 760K GBP) in loans on the platform. So far none of these loans have been sold on the secondary market.
Property loans were a new area for Funding Circle. To get it started Funding Circle used cash backs to incentivise investors. So far institutional investors have not invested into the property loans but this is likely to change soon.

Funding Circle sees retail and institutional investors as equally important for their lender mix in the future. Cashbacks are expected to be reduced in future as they were more important when new markets were introduced than now.

Funding Circle is working on improvements on the website and in communication to better meet the expectations of investors. The risk model is performing increasingly well over time. They also capture and monitor data about borrowers that they reject, watching for CCJs and other credit events.  This has enabled them to develop a more complete model, and ultimately enabled them to launch the E risk band.  E borrowers are people that they would previously have had to reject, but now they understand them well enough to feel they can accurately model the default risk.
Personal Guarantees are factored in to the risk banding process, and also considered in the manual underwriting stage; they do make an assessment of the “value” of the PG, but it’s aggregated amongst lots of other stats to produce an overall ‘score’.

In collections Funding Circle has  reduced their late rate (percentage of loans making late repayments) from 1.4% to 0.7% since they brought the function in house.
The recovery rate is currently at 20p/£1, but this is skewed by the vast volume of loans being made; Funding Circle expect this would be at c. 43p/£1 if the loan book was frozen.

Funding Circle produced a tool, for MPs, prior to the 2015 election, to show what businesses in what constituencies were borrowing what, from whom (and presumably, by extension, risk bandings etc).  This tool will be made available to investors via the Funding Circle website soon. Continue reading →