GROUNDFLOOR is on the INC. 5000 List!

Today, we announced that GROUNDFLOOR made its debut onto INC. Magazine’s list of fastest-growing private companies in the United States. Not only that, but we were ranked in the top 10% at #402 overall, and listed as the top financial services company from our home state of Georgia. 

I’m not big on startup awards. Too often, they seem like they might be bought and paid for, and deserve the eye rolls from envious rivals. But you can’t fake it to make it on the Inc. list! You either have at least the minimum of $2m in 2019 revenue and $100k in 2016, or you don’t. Revenue’s obviously not the only metric that matters, but it sure is an important one to help validate a vision that first took root in early 2013.

As context, it was just over seven years ago that my co-founder Nick Bhargava and I developed the idea for GROUNDFLOOR. We knew we were creating not just a new company, but a new product, in a new category, for a brand new audience. Many of the securities regulations that would ultimately govern our concept hadn’t even been formulated yet. A great many industry experts couldn’t grok or straight up didn’t like what we were trying to do, or see why it would matter. Needless to say, the odds seemed stacked against us. We kept going and persisted anyway.

When the State of Georgia passed the Invest Georgia Exemption - one of the first such laws in the nation based on the new JOBS Act of 2012 - we picked up and moved from Raleigh, N.C. to Atlanta to pilot the idea for GROUNDFLOOR. Our radical idea for GROUNDFLOOR was to open up private capital markets so that everyone could participate in them - not just institutions and the wealthiest among us. That commitment cost us a few years of growth, but we new the trade would ultimately be worth it.

I’m pleased to say that our idea has indeed taken off, just as we had hoped it would. We had to iterate like crazy and do lots of unscalable things in the early days, not to mention investing a lot of time and money in meeting complicated regulatory standards to stay true to our vision while others raced ahead with me-too products. But we ultimately became the very first company qualified by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to offer direct, real estate based debt investments for everyone, including accredited and non-accredited investors alike, under Regulation A.

Fast forward to today and GROUNDFLOOR has more than 80,000 registered users across the U.S. who have invested more than $270 million into over 1,750 real estate notes. We’ve repaid more than 1,000 notes for over $140 million, delivering investors a 10.6 percent average annualized return. Simply put - we’re allowing everyone to invest and build wealth through real estate in a lower-risk, more reliable way than has ever been available to the mass market before.

While I always believed in the power of our idea, in addition to navigating through its complexities, we’ve also had to navigate around massive external challenges beyond our control such as the federal government shutdown of 2018-2019, and the unprecedented impact from COVID-19 in 2020. But with each new challenge, our team continues to rise to the occasion and remains more true than ever to our mission of making private capital markets accessible to everyone.

I’m grateful to everyone who has been a part of our journey. To our employees, our investors, the real estate entrepreneurs whose projects we fund, and the 3,700+ individuals who have purchased shares of GROUNDFLOOR itself, I hope you’ll join me in acknowledging this great achievement. Even as we pause to celebrate, we know this is still only the beginning. There is so much value that remains to be built as we continue forging ahead to realize our vision, and today with this honor from Inc. I'm as fired up and defiant about that as I've ever been.

p.s. If you don’t already own stock in Groundfloor or do but want to add to your holdings, our Series B preferred stock financing is open on SeedInvest with a brand new video & compelling pitch deck at https://seedinvest.com/groundfloor. Join us!