Seedrs closes £10m funding round from £6m crowdfunding campaign

Seedrs, the UK’s biggest investor in private companies, has today (October 3) closed a £6m crowdfunding round. This will add to £4m invested last month by Woodford Investment Management, taking the total amount raised to £10m.

The fundraising round values Seedrs at £50m on a fully-diluted, post-money basis. Over 2,000 existing shareholders and new customers, from 35 countries, invested over the course of the five-day campaign.

The average individual investment was £3,200 and the largest individual investment was £800k with the highest number of investors coming from the UK, Germany, Portugal, France and Italy.

Jeff Kelisky, chief executive officer of Seedrs, commented on the news: “We are delighted to have received over £6m investment from over 2,000 of our customers and community. It was important to us that we could open up as much as possible for our existing investor base.

“This round is yet more evidence of the market’s conviction that Seedrs is on the right path to delivering shareholder value by opening venture capital opportunities to retail investors for fast growth companies…

“Without Seedrs having pioneered regulated equity investment, these opportunities would have remained closed to them.”

On his investment, Andy Murray added: “As an active investor into early-stage businesses through the Seedrs platform, it was important for me to take up my pre-emption rights.

“I have made a substantial follow on investment into this round to show my support for all that Seedrs has achieved since the last raise in 2015. The team has done some great work in supporting European startups.”

Seedrs confirmed that capital raised in this fundraising round will be used to launch new product capabilities that aims to increase liquidity and return potential for investors and businesses, as well as build out increased sales and marketing efforts.

Seedrs has now funded over 530 deals with more than £260m invested into campaigns on the platform, with the last 12 months seeing an aggressive ramp up in activity including the launch of equity crowdfunding sector’s first Secondary Market in May 2017. Some investors have realised up to 19x returns on investments.