We enter 2018 with over £310M invested into campaigns and more than 590 deals funded since our launch. To mark the New Year we thought we’d take a look back at the past twelve months and all the achievements that have led to another record year at Seedrs.
Key achievements
- £125M was invested into campaigns and 168 deals funded across 8 countries and 17 different sectors
- Investors from 58 countries made over 46,700 investments in the 12 month period
- June saw the launch of the pioneering Seedrs Secondary Market and by the end of the year there had been nearly 700 investor exits with shares traded from 147 businesses
- We successfully closed our own £10M funding round led by Neil Woodford and 1,900 of our own customers
- We were named ‘The Most Active Funder in UK private companies‘
- British Tennis champion Andy Murray backed more than 10 British businesses through the platform in 2017
A year packed with large rounds
There was a 130% increase in £1M+ campaigns in 2017 compared to the previous year, breaking a number of records in the process. Standout campaigns included:
- Challenger bank Revolut raised its cap of £3.8M from over 4,200 investors in August 2017 as part of their £50 million Series B round led by Index Ventures, awarding them the accolade of the largest number of investors in a campaign on Seedrs
- Dutch startup Bolt, hailed as the ‘Dutch Tesla on Two Wheels’, raised €3.2M from an impressive 2,400 investors. Bolt became Seedrs’ biggest non-UK crowdfunding campaign of all time by both amount raised and by number of investors
- Smart home-tech startup Den, from London, raised £2.27M from over 1,200 investors
- Zoopla-backed Landbay returned to Seedrs to raise £2.4M
Portfolio Success
Blow LTD, the on-demand beauty services startup, gave Seedrs investors an opportunity to sell their shares to retail giant Debenhams – giving 48 investors an exit.
Wealthify, the robo-advisory platform, agreed the sale of a majority interest to insurance leader Aviva, giving 783 investors an exit, some of whom only purchased their shares a few months ago.
Seedrs CEO, Jeff Kelisky commented, “I am thrilled with the company’s growth and progress over the last 12 months. From record-breaking campaigns with over 4,000 investors and portfolio exits to launching pioneering new products, 2017 has been an outstanding year for Seedrs. This year we saw £125 million invested into campaigns on the platform which is a 44% increase from 2016 and more than any other private equity platform. The results in 2017 have definitively established our leadership in the industry.
The ongoing success of our portfolio with exit opportunities, such as Wealthify and Blow LTD, alongside the number of impressive investor exits on our Secondary Market, demonstrate that sophisticated investors are actively looking at this asset class as a part of their broader portfolio.”
View our full 2017 Year in Review at stats2017.seedrs.com
