Private market access from Seed to IPO

In May, the FCA issued a consultation paper proposing equity listing rule reforms in response to a steading 15-year decline in UK IPO activity.

The consultation aims to streamline the process of listing a business in the UK to help attract a broader range of companies, encourage competition and improve choices for investors.

This is a massively welcome initiative from all of us here at Crowdcube!

It's been on the horizon for some time now, and we announced our ambitions to offer up IPO opportunities to our 1.5Mn+ retail investors mid-2021.

Unfortunately, our timing could have been a little better...

The announcement was swiftly followed by the public and private markets going into turmoil and the IPO market shutting shop ??

Our plans quickly changed, but our ambition didn't.

We doubled down in Europe, becoming the first and only regulated platform for the UK and European markets and enabling us to hit the ground fast.

We raised ￡Mn's for fantastic brands such as VICIO , Heura Foods , 900.care , Matera & Green-Got and have grown our EU investor base by hundreds of thousands of new members.

Despite the carnage in the UK market, our mission remains the same.

To lower the barriers to entry and provide exciting new opportunities to a range of private market investments from Seed to IPO across now, both the UK and Europe.

As I mentioned last month, a fundamental part of this strategy is to open up access points and provide opportunities that enable investors to utilise Crowdcube as a single platform for achieving a broad range of private market diversification.

For many years, crowdfunding has been pigeonholed as the home of beers, coffee and challenger banks.

Don't get me wrong; we are proud to have supported brands like Monzo, Revolut, Brewdog, Camden Town & Grind, but the opportunity is much broader than this, and we have made great strides this year.

We launched our first VCT offering in partnership with Octopus Investments, which raised ￡1.4Mn for their Apollo fund from over 700 investors.

Interestingly, 95.6% of these investors are repeat customers on Crowdcube, proving our hypothesis that diversification is a fundamental demand among our members.

The campaign was also in the top 2% for the largest average ticket size on the platform, with individuals investing 3.5X their average amount.

Just last week, we announced our partnership with RetailBook, a collaboration of financial heavyweights, including Hargreaves Lansdown, Numis, Jeffries, Peel Hunt & Rothschild & Co. that enables our community of 1.5mn investors to engage in IPOs under the same terms as institutional investors.?

RetailBook is a technology-led platform connecting companies looking to raise capital with retail investors via brokers and wealth managers. And now also through Crowdcube! It is one of several other opportunities we are working on to open up broad access points for retail investors across the UK and Europe.

Once the public markets return, that is...

To hear more about our plans this year, please follow me / subscribe below, and for specific announcements about our work with Retail Book, you can also sign up below.

See you next time!