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Sunday 20 May 2018

Crowdcube - what a week that was!


Despite the very recent fiasco with Sugru and yet more large losses filed by Asio Ltd (Chirp), Crowdcube has helped Adzuna raise another £8m and Freetrade another £3.1m all in the last 7 days.


Our only surprise is that along with Louis Litt and Mike, Darren was not to be seen at the Wedding.

Both of these raises were entirely or largely carried out in the private mode, with Freetrade taking in £2.5m before opening out and Adzuna, using 400 Crowdcube investors, never appearing on the public site.

Still the crowd has had chances to invest in both, through the public site and was enthusiastic in doing so - we just have to to see if the virtual value that these companies have created becomes a reality or whether more funding indicates a situation more akin to the Sugru one. A massive shortfall in revenues leading to a fire sale and the loss of investors £5.5m. There was little warning with Sugru, we had a heads up from inside Crowdcube, so we'd expect there to be little with any new disasters.

There has been an assiduous radio silence from Beauhurst on their misuse of CAGR for working out investors 'returns'  - only relying on next round valuations for their data. We would have thought the very obvious hazards in this method, so clearly shown by Sugru and few other recent collapses, after up round fundings, would have led to a statement? Maybe the FCA should look at redefining 'misleading'?

It's a crazy world out there - take care. 

6 comments:

  1. I invested Sugru … should have suspected poor management when they invested over £500,000 in an ERP system instead if spending that money on delivering the product (Excel may not be sexy but it works perfectly fine for a business that size).


    Also the amount of money and effort spent on their packaging was just ludicrous. When I walk into a diy store looking for Sellotape or glue I truly don't care what it looks like - it needs to do the job.


    Anyway I am also one of those people who has invested in Freetrade. They seem to be on the ball and they remind me greatly of Monzo, who we have to agree appears to be making a success of it. Not all crowdfunding is a failure, but you have to take the crap with the gold.

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  2. Such great news that these growing companies are A, raising decent sums and B, aren’t excluding ‘ordinary’ investors. Well done to Adzuna and Freetrade.

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  3. Can you expand on what is wrong with the Adzuna & FreeTrade raises please ? How do they link to Sugru ? What have they done wrong ?

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  4. Replies
    1. The point being made is that the two raises were not public - or mainly not public.It doesnt say they did anything wrong.

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    2. So why mention them in this article - are non public raises bad ? If so why ?

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