Two years ago this month, we launched the equity crowdfunding sector’s first comprehensive analysis on the characteristics and performance of funded deals: Seedrs’ Portfolio Update.
Bringing more transparency to the sector has always been in our long-term plan and we believe it’s fundamental to the success of early-stage investing as an asset class.
We’re delighted to release our Autumn 2018 Portfolio Update. This latest report is up 202 deals from the last one, looking at all 577 deals funded on the platform since we launched Seedrs in July of 2012, all the way up to the end of 2017.
Here are a couple of key pull outs:
- Equity crowdfunding is truly diverse: across Seedrs’ 17 sectors, no one sector accounts for more than 12% of the portfolio with the three largest being Food and Beverage (11.44% of deals), Finance and Payments (11.27% of deals) and Home and Personal (11.09% of deals)
- A real mix of types of businesses: B2C businesses make up nearly half of Seedrs’ portfolio, with B2B accounting for 30% and mixed B2B/B2C making up the rest
Jeff Lynn, co-founder and Executive Chairman at Seedrs, says: “One of our overarching goals when founding Seedrs was to bring the sort of data and transparency to the market for private equity that exists in other asset classes. Our groundbreaking series of Portfolio Updates is one example of our attempts to let investors and others quantify what is happening in our market. There is a lot more we plan to do in sharing our data going forward, but I am pleased that with this new edition of our Portfolio Update, we are continuing to push forward with our quest to rationalise this part of the capital markets.”
To request the full report, click here.
It’s important to note that the Portfolio Update focuses on paper returns and cannot be relied on as a predictor of future returns. Investing in early-stage businesses is high risk and the report reinforces the fact that investors should seek to diversify as much as possible across different sectors and types of businesses over time to help mitigate the risk.
Ernst & Young LLP (EY) reviewed the procedures and processes used by Seedrs for determining the estimates of fair value used to calculate the investment performance numbers, and EY considers that they are in line with the IPEV Guidelines.