Washington State has been on the march toward an intrastate crowdfunding exemption, and yesterday the effort took one more step toward becoming reality. House Bill 2023 was approved with an 89-9 vote.
The nine nay votes all came via House Republicans. The bill itself was introduced by Rep. Cyrus Habib, a Democrat and a lawyer who spent time advising startups in Washington. We’ve reached out to Representative Leonard Christian, one of the detractors, for comment and will update this article if and when we receive a response.
An article on KPBJ.com estimates that equity crowdfunding could be legal in Washington State sometime in 2015. In the article, Joe Wallin of the Startup Law Blog lauds the intrastate exemption’s expected affect on the cost of raising capital. He has a rather bearish prediction of costs associated with raising money under the federal rules – $250,000 for every $1 million raised – but he says that under this state law, issuers can expect to spend just “a couple of thousand dollars.”