JustUs parent company raises over £1.3m from Crowdcube campaign
JustUs’ parent company eMoneyHub has made its Crowdcube campaign public after raising over £1.3m so far in preparation for launching peer-to-peer mortgages.
eMoneyHub, which owns P2P lending platform JustUs and personal finance comparison site Moneybrain, has raised £1,312,720 from 281 investors with 24 days left of the fundraising. The group has beaten its £1.3m fundraising target in the campaign, which it launched after raising £1.2m through the government’s future fund.
The group has made the campaign available to public investors after giving early access to JustUs investors and users of its sister platform Moneybrain.
Lee Birkett (pictured), founder of eMoneyHub, said funds raised will go towards building the JustUs compliance team to launch P2P owner-occupied residential mortgages, called the People’s Mortgage, at the end of the second quarter, subject to a variation of permissions.
The People’s Mortgage offers investors the opportunity to fund 2.5 per cent fixed interest rate residential mortgages for homeowners, which are Innovative Finance ISA eligible.
Funds will also go towards paying for the necessary additional resources for eMoneyHub to offer its services to a global audience and to grow JustUs’s investor base and scale the platform.
Birkett said that as a result of the exposure of the campaign, more people are buying BiPs – a cryptocurrency – on Moneybrain and opening lender accounts on JustUs. He expects the campaign to lead to the platform’s lender base doubling.
Read more: JustUs founder says BoE digital currency would be “turning point for sector”
“Crowdcube has a million investors and they have JustUs in their shop window,” Birkett said.
“The international flavour from the campaign is amazing. I’d say one in five of the investors are overseas. We’ve had investors from Germany, Netherlands, India, Hong Kong, Italy and Peru.
“This is the start of global P2P, we’re probably one of the few global P2P operators and have a global currency people can participate in.
“There’s a lot of paperwork needed in order to launch P2P mortgages and that’s why we’re doing crowdfunding to pay for it.”