British cloud accounting software company, Clear Books, is aiming to raise £3.3 million on its own equity crowdfunding offering. This follows its first oversubscribed crowdfunding offer from last year. The company is offering 275,000 shares at a subscription price of £12 per share.
Whereas its competitors are backed by venture capital, private equity and pension funds, Clear Books has taken an alternative route to financing its growth. It has turned to its British customers and the British public to support it in its mission to provide easy to use and time saving accounting software to millions of small businesses in the UK.
In September 2013 Clear Books launched “Cloud Funding”. More than 700 people invested £840k and Clear Books became part owned by the small business community that uses its accounting software every day.
Since September 2013, Clear Books has increased its customer base from 5,000 to more than 7,000 small businesses, increased its monthly revenue from £60k to £100k and has achieved a 74% increase in annual revenue. Clear Books was awarded the UK Cloud Awards 2014 Best cloud accounting suite by a team of independent judges and last month was announced as the cloud accounting provider to Santander’s iBusinessHub. The iBusinessHub offers bundled packages of small business software exclusively to Santander’s 250,000 small business customers in the UK.
Founder and CEO of Clear Books, Tom Fouracre, stated, “It’s been a busy and successful year for Clear Books. Cloud Funding II represents a second opportunity for supporters of British business to own a part of our company. If you enjoy investing in small British businesses, you can do so from just £12. Our customers are small business owners and entrepreneurs who know our company intimately – they rely on our software every day to run their own businesses. It’s a wonderful validation of our mission, to help small businesses in the UK, that these entrepreneurs continue to invest and support Clear Books as we grow.”
Clear Books intends to raise £3.3m to execute a strategy to grow the number of small businesses that use Clear Books. “Our vision is to be the market leader of cloud business software to SMEs in the UK, our mission is to work together in business to support small British businesses and our goal is to have 200,000 small business customers,” explains Fouracre.
Clear Books has taken the unique step of developing its own crowdfunding platform to accept investments and issue share certificates to shareholders. In doing so, this keeps fees to a minimum, less than 1% of funds raised compared to other sources of finance which typically cost 5-10% of funds raised.
Existing shareholders have a legal right to invest first. The general public will be invited to invest from August 4th and anyone can purchase shares from just £12.
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