FinTech firm Envestors has launched a Software-as-a-Service platform to give entrepreneurs control over their crowdfunding campaigns.
The London company empowers businesses to raise funds and manage investors from seed through to maturity.
Envestry for Scale-Ups has been proven across a base of over 50 customers and gives companies total control of their fundraising activities.
Fundraising for growth businesses has always been challenging: it is a time-consuming, expensive process with no guarantees of success. Exacerbating these challenges are complicated regulatory requirements that prevent businesses from promoting their investment opportunities to more than 150 people.
Until now, that has meant that businesses have to work with a middleman to raise funds. In exchange for support, companies sacrifice control, typically over campaign length, branding and ownership of investor data – which is crucial for subsequent funding rounds.
Envestry for Scale-ups empowers companies by giving them their own crowdfunding platform for the duration of the growth phase, which will typically include three to five funding rounds.
“This is all about empowering companies and giving them the best chance to raise funds,” said Scott Haughton, COO of Envestors. “An own-brand fundraising platform prepares businesses for their whole growth cycle, looking beyond a single raise and making sure that once a business secures investors, they are able to keep them happy and warm, ready for their next round.”
Kate Collinson of VzInternet, one of the firms using the platform, said: “What’s great about having our own platform is that we can maintain total control, we can communicate directly with investors, share our latest successes and monitor how the investment round is going whenever we want.”
The platform has the added benefit of allowing companies to set their fundraising campaign length – whether they want to run a long campaign for a large raise, a series of short micro raises or respond on-the-fly to positive news and open themselves up for funding. Zap&Go, an early Envestry for Scale-ups customer, found having the ability to open and close themselves to accept investment highly lucrative.
“Following a piece on BBC Click, we were able to capitalise on this welcome ‘buzz’ and, through our platform, were able to connect to 137 investors, make 39 deals and raised a further £437,000,” said Simon Harris, investment director of Zap&Go.