Farmdrop to expand outside London with £7m of new cash

Farmdrop raised £750k on Crowdcube in 2014. Now with over £11m invested in the company since, they are finally ready to launch outside London.

According to the 'simplistic' (Crowdcube's own term for their projections) projections that Farmdrop used on Crowdcube to sell their equity, they should now be turning over £70m (YE July 2017). According to Crowdcube's own blog, they expect to achieve £3m this year. 

Clearly someone thinks this is going to work on a scale, as investors led by Atomico have just put another £7m into the company. We have estimated that this was at a pre money valuation of around £14m. Crowdcube investors took shares at a valuation of around £2.5m. Atomico invested another £3m last year. We estimate that on the current valuation with dilution assumed, CC shareholders have been diluted 100% but have seen the value rise by 550%. Paper value, that is. Working backwards on 10X eventual EBITDA and a 5 times return on this round (value £21m post money), the company is going to have make a profit of over £10m. At its stated 6% EBITDA rate, that means revenues of £166m. So presumably an early sale based on numbers of current subscribers is more likely. 

The company is nowhere close to break even and it seems to us that after so long in London and with considerable investment and promotions, the revenues are small. But that's the way these tech driven investments go. Build to scale and hope that the profits follow. With the rapidly changing environment we live in we'd be bricking it a little on this one. 

Trust Pilot reviews are excellent unless you check them out by dates. All of the the poor reviews are very recent, possibly suggesting a problem with upping volumes? As with Just Park, the one defining  factor that Farmdrop have little control over is the consistent quality of the produce, once they have signed up a supplier. Bristol is next - worth watching how that goes.