Less than two years after raising £1.3 million through its first Crowdcube campaign, Crowdfunder UK has returned to the equity crowdfunding platform to raise £750,000 as it prepares to grow its partner network and further develop its reward-based funding portal.
Founded in 2014, Crowdfunder UK describes itself as the UK’s number one rewards-based crowdfunding platform. The funding portal revealed it has helped more than 80,000 charities, businesses, and community projects raise funds they need, and enable them to change lives and build communities. Crowdfunder UK also reported it works with M&S, Santander, Virgin, ad 20 local authorities to distribute grants and has plans to increase its share of the £5.6bn grant giving market.
Crowdfunder UK also revealed:
- The platform has grown it valuation by three fold. The portal plans to triple the value of the business again by 2020.
- It has raised over £40 million for UK projects. The platform’s goal is to raise a total of £200 million by 2020.
- The platform has over 600,000 members. We’re forecast to have two million by 2020.
While sharing details about Crowdfunder UK’s platform, managing director Phil Geraghty, stated:
“When Crowdfunder started in 2014, we only had two projects in the first month to work with. We’ve now worked with over 80,000 projects and raised over £40m – so you can really start to gain a sense of perspective of how rapidly we’ve grown. Since this first month however, we have always maintained that our mission, the very core of what we do, is to tackle society’s challenges by making ideas happen. We bring together projects that matter with supporters who care to raise the funds that they need – it’s as simple as that.
“I would say that, since we started out, there has definitely been a rise in the demand of funding needed to tackle societal issues. In the recent Social Enterprise UK 2017 report, it was revealed that there are now roughly 70,000 social enterprises in the UK – 82% of which applied for grant funding in the last year. Our platform is in this incredible position to not only offer support to all of our project owners, but to also help bring about change that has an impact on communities across the UK.”
In regards to the funding round, Geraghty added:
“Our last fundraise enabled us to grow from a small team of nine people into a dynamic group of thirty, which has allowed us to work with over 40,000 more projects and reach an incredible 600,000 members. Since this last fundraise, we have continued to develop successful relationships with partners and have distributed over £1.5m of their funding through our platform. However, the grant market alone is worth over £5billion and we’ve only just scratched the surface of what we could go on to achieve.
“We are now currently getting up to 200 projects a day coming to our platform, which ultimately means that the demand for our services is continuing to grow. In order to service this need, we must grow at the same pace. We want to fundraise this time around to further develop our tech and our team so that we can continue empowering people to turn their ideas into reality.
“As a crowdfunding platform, we are very proud to be owned by the crowd – we know that when the crowd comes together, great things can happen. We are delighted to already have over 1,000 shareholders and we want more people to join us on our journey.”
Since its launch, Crowdfunder’s latest Crowdcube campaign has raised more than £225,000 from over 175 investors. It is set to close at beginning of November.
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