Seedrs Closes £10 Million Funding Round

Seedrs closed a £6 million crowdfunding round. This sum adds to £4 million invested last month by Woodford Investment Management, taking the total amount raised to £10 million. The fundraising round values Seedrs at £50 million on a fully-diluted, post-money basis.

Over 2,000 existing shareholders and new customers, from 35 countries, invested over the course of the five-day campaign. 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.

Jeff Kelisky, Chief Executive Officer of Seedrs, said: “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 said about his investment: “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.”

Seedrs confirmed that capital raised in this fundraising round will be used launch new product capabilities that will 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.

Seedrs has now 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:

●    Launching the equity crowdfunding sector’s first 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 Programme in May 2017

●   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.

●    Continuing to work closely in partnership with Sir Andy Murray, who has now backed over 30 early-stage businesses on Seedrs, promoting the success of European SMEs

The fundraising round remains subject to consent by the Financial Conduct Authority and customary closing conditions.