Crowdcube Swamped: Investors Rush to Invest in Mondo Taking Site Down

On Monday, equity crowdfunding platform, Crowdcube, reportedly experienced some issues after large amounts of investors looked to put their money towards digital only bank, Mondo.

Mondo, a UK based challenger bank, announced earlier this month that it was seeking to raise £6 million through the crowdfunding portal to help fund its mobile-first vision of the future of banking. In return, the company is offering to sell £1 million worth of equity. The campaign went live at 12 p.m. GMT (7 a.m. ET) and was quickly met with a ton of interest, which led to Crowdcube’s overload.

Crowdcube co-founder Luke Lang revealed:

“We experienced unprecedented demand for mobile first challenger-bank Mondo, which caused issues with our website. Our engineering team are currently working hard to resolve this issue. The demand clearly demonstrates the level of interest in Mondo. We apologise for the inconvenience caused to investors.”

Mondo founder, Tom Blomfield, also shared that 6,000 people had pre-registered to take part in initiative and that the startup also emailed its existing customer waiting list, taking the total number of people notified to 44,000. 

Crowdcube announced on Twitter:

Thanks for your patience. We’re working hard to resolve the issues you’re facing at the moment & will post another update shortly.

— Crowdcube (@Crowdcube) February 29, 2016

Mondo responded:

.@Crowdcube are working hard to get the site back up. Sorry and hang on in there! ? — Mondo (@getmondo) February 29, 2016

A few hours after the technical difficulties began, Mondo stated:

We have temporarily paused our @Crowdcube campaign. We’re very sorry for the confusion so far and will have more updates ASAP.

— Mondo (@getmondo) February 29, 2016

Mondo has already received commitments from leading venture capitalists including Eileen Burbidge’s Passion Capital. The offer on Crowdcube represents a 3.33% equity stake in the firm. In an earlier funding round, Passion Capital paid £2 million for a 22.2% equity ownership. For the Crowdcube offer individual investments will be limited to £1000 per person as management previously predicted a strong demand.