Last week, London’s MonetaFlex launched a Crowdcube campaign with a mission to raise £100,000 for its own crowdfunding platform.
MonetaFlex describes the website as a place where companies can raise finance by selling their unpaid invoices and boasts an online, collaborative early payment solution. The company shared:
“We are MonetaFlex and we are building an online crowdfunding platform that offers businesses a quicker and more flexible option to raise short-term funding by selling their unpaid invoices to multiple investors.”
Revealing those behind the site, MonetaFlex’s team explained:
“The two co-founders, Simba [Chiguma] and Michael [Eagleton], have backgrounds in private equity and corporate debt investment at global investment firms (KKR and Terra Firma Capital Partners) and MonetaFlex’s chairman is Peter Gardner, a former executive committee member at HSBC Alternative Investments and one of the original investors in Last.fm (sold to CBS for $280m) and an early backer of SUGRU which raised £3.5m on Crowdcube in July 2015. Our CTO, Emmanuel, has built software platforms for major financial institutions including BNP Paribas, Bloomberg and Unicredit.”
Key features of MonetaFlex include:
A. Invoice Finance Crowdfunding
- Businesses are able to sell one invoice at a time to multiple investors in competitive online auctions allowing for greater flexibility
- Typical whole-book invoice financing (whereby a business is contractually obliged to sell most of its invoices to a bank or finance company) is not suitable for all businesses and MonetaFlex provides the flexibility to dip in and out as business needs demand without contracts
B.
Collaborative Supplier Early Payment
- Businesses with excess cash in the bank can request suppliers to bid (by offering discounts) for early payment in automated auctions
- Suppliers can bid to receive discounts at any point during the tenor of an invoice
- This compares favourably to static arrangement’s usually included within payment terms e.g. “2% in 10 days” which translates to a high cost of financing for the supplier of 37% APR on a 30 day invoice
The company plans to use the funds from the Crowdcube towards Platform development (£50,000), Office space including dedicated office space post launch (£10,000), Marketing budget (£10,000), and Annual salaries (£30,000).
The campaign, which is set to close at the beginning of September, has already secured over £64,000.
____________________________________________
Have a crowdfunding offering you'd like to share? Submit an offering for consideration using our Submit a Tip form and we may share it on our site!
