Equity Crowdfunding?

Dougiekc

Has anyone had any success stories re: Crowdcube?

I have taken a couple od small(ish) investments via crowdcube of late, more like indulgences. JustEat I believe offered equity via Crowdcube quite some time ago. Anyone got any examples of investments starting to flourish?

bowlhead99

Dougiekc wrote: »

Anyone got any examples of investments starting to flourish?

Grind (London based coffee shop/bar/ restaurant) used Crowdcube to raise money by way of bond issue a few years back, to fund their own roastery.

At the back end of last year they returned to Crowdcube, this time offering equity, and easily blew through their fundraise target. It's good to see a company spending money on what they said they would spend it on and you can see they have continued to expand across a number of trendy locations which appear full enough that I can believe they are probably hitting their revenue targets. And the business plan has a proposed expansion into transport hubs to get them beyond London.

To be honest I thought their recent equity raise valuation was a bit ambitious, but with EIS relief to lower the effective cost and give downside protection, plus the fact they offered a special loyalty card with enough daily automatically applied points to get you a free coffee up to five times a week if you invested £2.5k - I bought some.

The shares for that round are just in the process of being issued, so it's not a live issue in which you can participate, just an example of a business local to me that seems to be doing OK, used their last fundraise well enough - so far as we can tell, without the full financials that are impossible to get access to when you're only investing small sums - and seems well capitalised now (unlike some which may collapse within a few months of taking funds, or simply disappear off into the sunset). So if you bought into their bond a while back you should be pretty confident that they have the balance sheet to be able to pay it off and refinance.

They're nowhere near a Just-Eat level of triumph yet though (that being a business I used, liked, and backed at IPO).