Described as “crowdfunding meets Dragons Den & X-Fractor, last Friday, UK based Intelligent Crowd TV announced the launch of a weekly show to bring together entrepreneurs and investors, nationwide. The website goes live today (www.intelligentcrowd.tv) for Entrepreneur auditions, and the first episode is scheduled to air in January 2015. The show will be hosted by Nick Batsford, City stalwart, broadcaster & Journalist, and will be available on tablet, PC, iOS and Android devices. It will be webcast live in an early evening slot, to accommodate live audience Q&A, but will also be available for viewing on- demand.
Intelligent Crowd TV seeks to address challenges of both company founders and for investors. Regardless how strong the business proposition, founders still face the challenge of communicating the opportunity and making it stand out to attract investors. Investors with the most wealth to invest, tend to have the least time to properly evaluate opportunities to select those that hold the most promise.
Founder & CEO Shane Smith explains:
“There is a healthy abundance of crowdfunding platforms and with so many new companies listing every day across these platforms, investors face a real challenge. Intelligent Crowd TV screens opportunities, adds an overlay from one of America’s longest-established research firms, grills the founders live on air and then hands them over to the audience for questions via Skype.
“Making individual judgments, as on X-Factor and similar shows, each member of the audience can then independently “vote” for their preferred pitches.
“With this work taking just one hour a week, investors are much better placed to make an informed decision when their chosen pitch goes live on a Crowdfunding platform; and the founders are off to a great start with a cohort of knowledgeable investors behind them. We believe that with a live show to allow nationwide audience participation, we are bringing a world first to the UK equity crowdfunding scene, and we hope that Intelligent Crowd TV will help investors make better decisions, as well as make more use of the very generous SEIS tax framework in the UK to build a diversified portfolio of early stage investments”.
The Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme (SEIS) is a very generous tax program in the UK that offsets loss incurred by investing in early stage companies.
Intelligent Crowd TV is a spin-out of International Capital Connections Limited.