According to an announcement today, UK-based online equity investment platform VentureFounders has had more than £40 million invested in campaigns presented on the platform since its launch at the end of 2014.
VentureFounders participates in average funding round sizes of £1.8 million, also including investment from VCs and angels investors, especially focusing on funding for the UK’s disruptive scale-up businesses. Since its inception, the platform has garnered significant investor confidence.
The average individual investment amount has been around £15K, and the average portfolio size has been approximately £50K, with the majority of investors regularly coming back to invest in VentureFounders opportunities.
Co-Founder and Managing Director, James Codling commented:
We designed VentureFounders to meet the needs of sophisticated investors who were interested in equity crowdfunding, but couldn’t access the sort of quality opportunities they thought had the most potential to succeed. We’ve worked hard to build up our network and ensure that smart UK scale-ups want us to back their growing business, alongside their institutional investors.
He mentioned that 85 per cent of their investment portfolio now has institutional backing, which of course sits well with their investor base, who want to be informed about the fact that sufficient due diligence has been carried out on the businesses in which they invest.
Till date, VentureFounders has witnessed higher than average success, with as much as 87% of the investment opportunities put forward on the platform having conducted successful fundraising campaigns. Codling explained:
Our team of investment experts have an eye for investment opportunities. We carefully select and due diligence potential opportunities as part of our investment process, which is why we have seen success in reaching our fundraise targets when they go live on the platform.
As for business growth plans, they have significant ones charted out for 2017, with Codling going on to say:
We now have a lot of momentum behind our business model and highly ambitious growth targets for this year. After a lot of groundwork to create an experience that caters for sophisticated investor, the wheels are in motion for us to now ramp up our operations and significantly increase the number of high class opportunities funding through the platform, and the volume of investment they receive.
VentureFounders’ portfolio companies are also being continually stimulated by the potential of the platform’s first monetization event happening in 2018. Codling concluded:
We are very excited by some of the updates we are receiving from our portfolio businesses and we have seen a significant uplift in the value of our underlying portfolio in 2016.
VentureFounders is slated to release an update on the performance of its portfolio companies in early Q2 2017.
