For only €100, participants on French crowdfunding site WiSEED can pursue attractive returns while also improving the world they live in. The platform prides itself on improving financial literacy, providing a transparent look into how it selects opportunities, and its commitment to providing alternative financing solutions for unlisted companies. To date, 21, 742 people have invested € 333 million.
WiSEED CEO Mathilde Iclanzan recently answered a few questions about the platform and the state of crowdfunding in Europe.
Describe how WiSEED began. What experiences did the founders have that made them decide to create the company?
In 2008, Thierry Merquiol and Nicolas Sérès, whose job was to support startups in a French public incubator, decided to take up a new challenge : fund young businesses at a seed stage by the crowd.
Just after the crisis, funding early stage businesses was hard. After investigating donation platforms, they imagined a new way of funding, equity crowdfunding – for the first time in the world. That’s how WiSEED – pronounced “We Seed” in French – was born!
Talk about the effects of the pandemic on European businesses. What changes have you seen in your clientele if any?
We are working in three sectors with quite different issues. Regarding real estate, the market clearly increased in 2021 comparing to 2020. There has been some structural delays due to the economic context after the stop of construction works, administrative processes and lately scarcity of raw materials. It led some professionals to ask for time extension to reimburse the WiSEEDers. Although, in the end, real estate operators reimbursed their funds before the delay they had been granted.
As per startup in the environmental or health sectors, institutional funds reactivated massive fundings in 2021, after 2020 had been quite “on hold”.
As far as investors are concerned, we noticed two major trends : the average investment per project is lower (921€ in 2021 compared to 994€ in 2019) but investors tend to diversify in more projects invested.
How will you benefit from the ECSPR introduction? Are there particular areas of the EU you believe will most benefit?
It’s clear that the European ruling is going to reshape the crowdfunding market!
If you take equity crowdfunding, the UK regulation gives more advantages to people investing in businesses than France or Germany. That’s why UK has reached £1 billion in funding. Sadly, they won’t be concerned by the European ruling since Brexit happened…
Some countries have already shown they have a favorable ground for crowd investments, like Italy or Germany, but we lack major and gathered data on that matter.
It seems to me that the UE Ruling will bring 4 major achievements :
1/ cross platforms/cross countries partnerships ;
2/ cross country funding for startups;
3/ make crowdfunding still more about the crowd: enlarging the base to individual investors who would come from the all Europe; and
4/ keep on the European construction, not only with the industry sector, but also with innovative sectors like fintech, with the consolidation of a European crowdfunding industry and a solid market.
Have you seen differences in the types of countries seeking funding from different parts of the EU in general?
SME markets in Europe are the prevailing niches, where in France, real estate drives the growth.
The ECSPR introduction is a good first step for crowdfunding; tax harmonization between states will be the next one.
What trends and factors are you watching in the markets? What are the biggest factors you expect to impact the industry in 2022?
As I said earlier, regarding investors we tend to see a bigger diversification of their investments. In total, they invest in more projects. It’s very positive for us because it proves our educational strategy to build awareness on our investors about the risks and work towards more diversification is working !
In the real estate sector, the money collected is progressively shifting from promotion projects towards property trading with rehabilitation. We expect this trend to be confirmed this year.
More generally, a big trend, a consequence of the COVID-19 crisis, is that everyone has big expectations on where our savings go.
Sectors as environment and health are clearly the future in that matter. European taxonomy emphasizes on the priority that should be given to “green investments”.
At WiSEED we’ve funded these projects since our beginning and we focus our investment policy in selecting promising and innovative projects like MedTech, GreenTech of HealthTech startups.
In January, many French unicorns announced record fundraisings, most of which are developing at the European scale.
Unicorns are going to rise in the European fintech sector and on innovative projects. No doubt, WiSEED, will take its share ! 😊