What3Words Investment

Millyonare

Low revenue, big losses, niche service... Ahm oot.

Exodi

Flugelhorn said:

the only way that they are going to make £££ is if the w3w becomes as universal as a postcode / zipcode and they charge for the use of the database

They already do this:

https://support.what3words.com/en/articles/3579829-how-does-what3words-make-money

https://what3words.medium.com/how-does-what3words-make-money-f7ddfa791ab4#:~:text=We make money by licensing,what3words addresses into GPS coordinates.

Which is even more terrifying given that their balance sheets shows £0.8M t/over at a cost of £47.2M. I'd expect many of the contracts they have are currently at a negligible cost to build brand awareness.

boingy

I did let out a little giggle when I saw admin expenses of £47 million on a turnover of £800K.
Imagine trying to secure new investment with those figures.
I guess they are just waiting to be bought by someone.

In the meantime I do use the site and the app and it is really useful, except for the time I mistyped a word and tried to send a team to Norway instead of Gloucestershire. One of 'em cycles and he said he might need a few more days to get there... 

Exodi

boingy said:

I did let out a little giggle when I saw admin expenses of £47 million on a turnover of £800K.
Imagine trying to secure new investment with those figures.
I guess they are just waiting to be bought by someone.

And yet we have people coming to the forums asking about investing in them, the mind boggles.

Don't forget that these financials are a decade after they were founded, it makes you wonder if the executive team is just riding the gravy train for as long as they can.

I mean look at this: https://www.crowdcube.com/explore-companies/what3words?country=GB

20 different funding rounds - over $60M of crowdsourced funding.

I mean you wouldn't believe it, but if I go to the homepage: ( https://www.crowdcube.com/ ) it shows an advert for 'what3words' next round of funding...



Just a week ago they updated a page on their site specifically regarding investment:

https://support.what3words.com/en/articles/2808964-how-can-i-invest-in-what3words

In fact if I looked over past articles, the amount they have raised from investors is absolutely staggering.

Eyeful

  https://www.crowdcube.com/explore-companies/what3words?country=GB

At the top of the above website is the warning:-

Don’t invest unless you’re prepared to lose all the money you invest. This is a high-risk investment and you are unlikely to be protected if something goes wrong.

Hopefully this should assist the OP on if they want to invest in that company. 

boingy

Eyeful said:

  https://www.crowdcube.com/explore-companies/what3words?country=GB

At the top of the above website is the warning:-

Don’t invest unless you’re prepared to lose all the money you invest. This is a high-risk investment and you are unlikely to be protected if something goes wrong.

Hopefully this should assist the OP on if they want to invest in that company. 

Yeah, but tomorrow they might get bought by Apple/Microsoft/Google/Whoever - KER-CHING!    
That's how these investors work. They invest in dozens of high risk "vapourware" companies and hope one of them eventually makes enough to cover the losses of all the others. It's not a game for normal investors.

Qyburn

What's the point anyway? We already have OSGB grid references which can define down to one meter, and can be read directly off a map.

flaneurs_lobster

Qyburn said:

What's the point anyway? We already have OSGB grid references which can define down to one meter, and can be read directly off a map.

Have a look at the W3W website, pretty much their entire USP is exactly the answer to this question.

MX5huggy

Qyburn said:

What's the point anyway? We already have OSGB grid references which can define down to one meter, and can be read directly off a map.

OSGB does not cover the whole world, obviously there’s other systems that do but they are quite complex to understand and share, if I said go to Connor Drive you might have some doubts about where that is but 

///money.saving.expert

https://w3w.co/money.saving.expert

will lead you straight there. 

That not to say I think it’s worth x million. If it was run like Wikipedia it would be better. 

boingy

Qyburn said:

What's the point anyway? We already have OSGB grid references which can define down to one meter, and can be read directly off a map.

Because "grants.logo.shield" is a whole lot more human-friendly and memorable than either "51.513759, -0.088168" or "TQ3276081158"