Less than two weeks after launching its latest equity crowdfunding campaign on Crowdcube, challenger stockbroker app Freetrade is now nearing £3.5 million in funding from more than 4250 investors. The latest campaign comes a little over a year after the company raised £3.1 million through its previous Crowdcube round.
As previously reported on Crowdfund Insider, Freetrade is aiming to raise a max of £5 million through the latest funding round. Founded in 2016, Freetrade stated it is building a “beautiful” investing app specifically for trading real shares with zero commission or fees.
“Freetrade makes investing simple and free. An FCA-regulated stockbroker, their app is now available on iOS and Android in the UK with plans to launch in Europe. We built a serverless, mobile-optimised tech stack which can scale to millions of customers. It means we can offer our basic service for free. We have a freemium model, only charging for the extras our customers want.”
Freetrade also reported that since April, it has grown its customer number by 100% to over 30,000 and since our raise have shipped features like Apple Pay top-ups, Filters and Collections. The company noted that it is seeking the funds to ramp up its customer acquisition and engineering. The funding will also support our expansion into the EU. In a recent update, Freetrade announced it has been planning to offer fractional shares since day one.
“But the legacy stockbroker infrastructure in Europe doesn’t allow for it. So we’ve had to build something new. It also means that we had to level up our regulatory permissions. Today, the FCA granted us those permissions. It means we can legally start dicing up shares and our customers can buy or sell any amount regardless of the price of a single share. Once we start rolling this feature out, we’ll be the only company in the world currently offering this for UK and EU shares. We’re also still set to offer US fractionals too, which is already an established practice in the States that we can plug into.”
The funding round is currently scheduled to close at the end of July.
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