Seedrs and Crowdcube: A P2P history
Seedrs and Crowdcube announced their intention to merge earlier this month, paving the way for an equity crowdfunding giant in the UK.
The two platforms have been used on numerous occasions by peer-to-peer lenders looking to raise funds for growth.
Peer2Peer Finance News takes a look at some of these campaigns.
Seedrs
Assetz Capital
At the start of June, Assetz Capital launched its fourth funding round on Seedrs, which it said would be a pre-cursor to its application to the future fund.
The platform set a minimum target to raise £500,000 from private investors, which it intended to be match funded by the government’s investment, taking the total to £1m.
In July, Assetz raised its fundraising target from £1m to £1.5m, after an initial Seedrs equity funding round was oversubscribed with more than £652,000 pledged by investors. This month, the platform completed the funding round.
Landbay
In August 2017, the buy-to-let lender, which was a P2P platform at the time, raised more than £2.4m on Seedrs, exceeding its £1.5m target, to support its expansion plans.
Then in April 2018, Landbay raised £1.6m, exceeding its £1.25m target, in its sixth round of equity crowdfunding on the Seedrs platform. This was to edge closer to its aim of becoming profitable by the end of the year.
At this point the platform had raised £6.4m via Seedrs over the past four years.
Welendus
In March 2017, P2P payday loan platform Welendus raised more than £100,000 on Seedrs to go ahead with its plans to shake up the payday lending market by offering more reasonable rates.
Then in November that year the platform launched a new crowdfunding round on Seedrs to raise an additional £150,000 for marketing and to increase its team ahead of the platform’s launch.
Other P2P lending platforms that have raised money on Seedrs include: The House Crowd, Abundance, CrowdProperty, Crowdstacker, Elfin Market, British Pearl, Investly, EstateGuru, AxiaFunder and Flender.
Crowdcube
Propifi
In July 2018, property P2P lender Propifi launched a £250,000 crowdfunding campaign on Crowdcube.
After launching earlier in the year, it was looking to raise funds to finance technological development and regulatory approval.
Nebeus
In September 2018, the cryptocurrency P2P lending platform launched a £1.1m crowdfunding campaign on Crowdcube.
Nebeus said it would use the funds to obtain an e-money licence from the Financial Conduct Authority and launch its services to a wider audience.
LandlordInvest
The next month, LandlordInvest’s £600,000 pre-series A fundraising round went live on Crowdcube.
The buy-to-let and bridging lender was looking to scale up its operations, including hiring staff, refining its offering for the intermediary market and developing new technical resources.
Ablrate
In January last year, the asset-backed P2P lender launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise £350,000.
Ablrate said the funds would be used to help build its blockchain-powered secondary market platform and its broker platform.