18 Mar Justpark raises £ 3,7 million: another crowdfunding record broken
The first quarter of the year saw a couple of crowdfunding records broken in the US and the UK. US has by far the largest crowdfunding campaigns. UK is the leader of the pack in Europe.
JustPark announced yesterday that it has closed its highly successful equity crowdfunding round on Crowdcube having raised £3.7 million from 2916 investors purchasing 15.61% equity in the firm in 34 days. According to Crowdcube, investors came from around the world including Hong Kong, Costa Rica and Monaco. Approximately 1/3 of investors were users of the product. The funding round is the largest equity crowdfunding raise in UK history.
JustPark, founded in 2006, is indicative of a shift in UK equity crowdfunding as larger, later stage firms, take advantage of the internet to quickly and efficiently raise capital. Crowdfunding platforms generate more revenue off of larger, successful issues, and thus are incentivized to pursue larger firms to scale. (Source: Crowdfund Insider)
Less than a month ago, records were broken in the US with two reward-based crowdfunding campaigns. It started on 22 February, with Flow Hive raising funding on the Indiegogo platform. The campaign reached its goal of $70,000 within the first eight (!) minutes, and the donations kept pouring in, hitting a record-breaking $2.18 million in the first 24 hours. Counting today, it has already raised $6,4 million with 19 days left for the campaign to close.
On 23 February the campaign of Pebble Time got started at the crowdfunding platform of Kickstarter. It was fully funded at $500,000 in just 32 minutes according to Kickstarter. It crossed $1 million in funding 16 minutes later and exceeded $5 Million within 5 hours. About 24 hours after launch, Pebble has amassed nearly $9 million That’s by far the fastest ever crowdfunding project to reach $5 million. With still 9 days to go from today it counts nearly $19 million.
Kickstarter and Indiegogo are the two biggest alternative finance platforms offering services for reward-based crowdfunding. The biggest online platform for alternative finance is Lending Club, its offers P2P lending. The IPO of Lending Club officially hit the $1 billion mark in December 2014 with underwriters exercising their full option to purchase 8.7 million shares.
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