Crowd with Us readies for £2m funding round ahead of IFISA launch
CROWD with Us is gearing up for a £2m equity fundraise, in order to expand the team and to invest in marketing and technology.
The property debt and equity crowdfunding platform said it is set to launch the fundraise before Christmas to scale up the business faster. “We are working on a secondary market and improvements to the investor experience,” co-founder Robert Pasternak told Peer2Peer Finance News.
“We are planning on launching ‘social investing’, whereby investors can follow each other on the platform.” A longer-term project will be the development of AI to speed up the decision-making process on deals, Pasternak added. “Over the next two to three years we will be developing an AI solution to bring the approval process down to a matter of minutes,” he said.
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“We would like to be able to white label this product for other platforms eventually.”
Crowd with Us is planning to launch an Innovative Finance ISA (IFISA) by the end of the first quarter of 2020, although the equity fundraise takes priority.
“We’re ready to go but we’re focusing on the equity raise first,” Pasternak said.
“We need to use the proceeds to grow the team so that we have enough resources to support the IFISA.”
Ahead of the equity raise, Crowd with Us is launching a revamped website shortly, with the focus on improving the customer experience.
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With regard to investor inflows, co-founder Rob Wilkinson said that they were seeing caution among sophisticated and high-net-worth investors ahead of the General Election.
“They [were] holding off investing to see if we [got] a Corbyn-led government or not,” he said.
“This seems to be in line with what other people we speak to in the industry are seeing. “I do strongly believe there’s enough money out there. I think people are just waiting for the political climate to settle down in order to move forward.”
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