Variable Pricing on the Seedrs Secondary Market is Live – Chances for some Interesting Trading Experiments

Seedrs logoI use Seedrs* to invest into the equity of British startups since 2013. I have written about several aspects and my experience in the past here on the blog. Overall my results are very satisfying. My annualized return (IRR) is currently 23.4%. As I am not a UK resident I forego the tax benefits of EIS/SEIS which according to the Seedrs*  dashboard would have pushed my IRR to 28.1% The one caveat is that some of the profits are paper gains, yet to be realized. But I cashed out on some substantial gains already, especially Revolut and Landbay shares via the Seedrs*  secondary market. I invested mostly (81%) in fintech startups – for those interested in the details here is a screenshot of my recent portfolio.

seedrs price changesSince 2017 Seedrs* provides a secondary market allowing investors to sell shares to each other. Depending on how in demand the traded startups are, shares sell out within minutes/seconds or the market opening (e.g. Revolut shares in 2019). The secondary market opens only for one week a month, a measure Seedrs has taken to heighten liquidity by concentrating demand and supply.

Up to now prices for the traded part were fix and changed seldom determined by ‘fair value‘ settings. Simplified in most cases the value of shares was set based on the valuation the startup raised capital on its last round. The price changed only with a new round and that usually happend only once every 1-2 years (see the picture, the curves are in most cases straight lines as there are only two datapoints). Furthermore the valuation of the startup is set (controlled) by the startup itself (unless there is a large professional investor like a VC participating in the round). I don’t want to do an excursion into the possible methods of startup valuation as that would make a rather long article, but rather say that some valuations of Seedrs pitches seemed rather inflated to me.

As early as Dec. 2018 Seedrs announced that it intended to enable variable pricing on the secondary market trading.

Since yesterday evening variable pricing is now live on the Seedrs* secondary market. Sellers can list their shares with discounts of up to -30% and premiums of up to 30%. Unfortunately Seedrs only allows steps of 10% and not granular 1% prices increases.

This will allow me some interesting experiments with the pricing feature

So far I mainly used the Seedrs secondary market to

a) buy to increase my stake in promising stakes in promising startups I already held and where I saw potential for further strong growth

b) sell shares to realize profits

The investment time frame for this has been multiple years. With flexible pricing there might be chances for some trading opportunities on shorter time spans.

In the early times of the secondary markets on Bondora* and Mintos* I did a lot of active trading. My learning was that there was a time span of several months when I could trade very profitable due to the fact that these secondary markets where very new, everbody had to learn which trading strategies worked best and there was a big mismatch between supply and demand. After a few month the opportunity vanished as traders got more professional and margins diminished. And the effort had to be worth my time invested. But those first months in a new market taught me a lot about market dynamics and market psychology, brought good profits and I had a lot of fun.

Repeating that on the Seedrs secondary market will not be easy. First of all the transaction fees on Seedrs secondary market are high. Second trading is not real time (it takes days for transactions to settle). And third the demand concentrates on a few startups that investors deem attractive while there is little buyer demand for all the other startups. On the other hand demand for startup shares is much more driven by expectations and emotions than on the p2p lending markets, where there are hard figures like YTM (yield to maturity) to gauge available parts on offer against each other.

Simply wishing to buy a share at -30% and then resell it at +30% obviously won’t work. But maybe buying at -30% and later reselling at -10%?

I sold more than 95% of the Revolut shares I held in May 2020 at the fixed fair value. There were a lot (about 2M GBP) of Revolut shares on offer in June and July trading cycles which went unsold. I will watch closely whether any offers at -30% will show up next trading cycle. At that price point I might be tempted to buy them again. At the time of this writing there is one lot on offer at -30%, three at -20% and multiple at -10%.

What’s your take on the introduction of variable pricing on the Seedrs secondary market. Share your opinion in the comments.

This article is not an investment advice. Investing in startups bears significant risks, including total loss of investment.

Estateguru Launches Equity Crowdfunding Round on Seedrs to Raise 2M

Baltic property lending platform Estateguru* has just launched a round on Seedrs* to raise up to 2 million EUR in new funding at a pre-money valuation of 28.8M EUR . Estateguru was launched in Estonia 6 years ago and has since expanded into the Latvian, Lithuanian, Finnish, Portugeese and German markets. Using the platform 47,000 investors have funded over 1,400 loans with a volume of 202 million EUR for an average return of 11.8% (as per Estateguru statistics page). All loans are secured by mortgages. Estateguru says that so far all recoveries of defaults have returned 100% of the capital and just the length of discovery varied sometimes taking months, sometimes taking years.

Estateguru plans to use the raised capital to further develop the product, especially improving features for institutional investors. Estateguru* can build on the experiences it made in a two-year relationship with German Varengold bank which has provided a credit line to finance loans. A second goal is to expand into further markets. In a recent investor webinar CEO Marek Pärtel named UK as a potential market, stating Estateguru already holds the required licenses since last year. Furthermore Estateguru will implement integration with payment provider Lemonway.

Pärtel said in the webinar that Estateguru has doubled in size every year in the past and expects the fast growth to continue in the future.

How to Invest Into Equity of P2P Lending Marketplaces

One of the main developments in UK p2p lending this autumn is the IPO (initial public offering) of Funding Circle. It will be open for investors that commit at least £1,000 through an intermediary (see list of participating intermediaries). Investing at the IPO means investors will invest at a very late stage of the growth phase of a startup. This article and this article suggest that it might not be a good idea to invest in an IPO.

But is there really a chance to invest into equity of a p2p lending marketplace at an early stage, if you are not an employee, business angel or VC? Up to a few years ago the answer would have been NO. But crowdfunding for equity came into use a recently and a surprising number of p2p lending companies have used this route to raise funding.

In this article I will look at the p2p lending services that have used British equity crowdfunding platform Seedrs* to raise money. Some of these p2p lending company funding rounds have taken place years ago, but the interesting point is that Seedrs has a secondary market and new investors can buy shares from existing investors that invested earlier through Seedrs. The secondary market opens every first Tuesday of a month (next on Oct. 2nd) and stays open for a week. Some of the shares on offer are in high demand and often sell out within an hour. If you’d like to buy on the secondary market you should open your Seedrs* account now, as you’ll need time to verify it and deposit funds prior to the market opening.

P2P Lending Startups that raised funding rounds through Seedrs

Assetz logoAssetz Capital
Assetz Capital* is a UK platform for SME loans. Assetz raised two rounds on Seedrs for an aggregate of 5.3 million GBP. The last round was in October 2017 at a pre-money valuation of 50M GBP. Shares of Assetz capital are usually in high demand on the Seedrs secondary market.

Brickowner logoBrickowner
Brickowner is a UK property investment platform. Brickowner raised four rounds for an aggregate of 0.4 million GBP. The last round was a converible in March 2018. The pre-money valuation in Nov. 2017 was 2.5M GBP. There is usually some availability of Brickowner shares on the secondary market.

Crowdlords
Crowdlords is UK property crowdfunding platform. Crowdlords raised one round for 0.2M GBP in Nov. 2014. The current pre-emption round is at a pre-money valuation of 3.2M GBP. There is usually limited availability of Crowdlords shares on the secondary market.

Crowdstacker
Crowdstaecker is a UK platform for SME loans. Crowdstacker is running a round right now for 0.8 million GBP at a pre-money valuation of 19.5M GBP.

Crowdproperty logoCrowdproperty
Crowdproperty is a UK platform for property development finance. Crowdproperty raised 0.9M GBP at a pre-money valuation of 5.9M GBP in November 2017. There is usually some availability of Crowdproperty shares on the secondary market.

Flender logoFlender
Flender* runs a platform for Irish SME loans. Flender raised on Seedrs round of 0.5M GBP at a pre-money valuation of 4.5M GBP in January 2017. Supply of Flender shares on the secondary market is scarce.

Investly logoInvestly
Investly* is a platform for invoice financing operating in the UK and Estonia. Investly raised on Seedrs round of 0.7M GBP at a pre-money valuation of 6.6M GBP in March 2018. Investly shares have been in high demand on the secondary market.

Landbay logoLandbay
Landbay* is a UK platform for buy-to-let mortage lending. Landbay did multiple Seedrs rounds from 2013 till 2018. The last round was in March 2018 at a pre-money valuation of 28.9M GBP. There is usually good availability of Landbay shares on the secondary market.

Orca logoOrca Money
Orca is an aggregator for UK p2p lending investments. Orca is running a round right now for 0.5M GBP at a pre-money valuation of 1.8M GBP.

Welendus logoWelendus
Welendus is a UK platform for short-term loans. Welendus raised 1.3M GBP GBP through 3 Seedrs campaigns including the currently running round at a pre-money vaulation of 6.0M GBP.

There are shares of mulitple other interesting fintechs available on the Seedrs* secondary market, including Commuter Club which has an interesting connection to p2p lending: The loans for the transport tickets were financed first by Ratesetter lenders and now by Zopa lenders. There is usually good availability of Commuter Club shares on the secondary market.

P2P-Banking has a pre-launch notification service for upcoming new Seedrs campaigns. Sign up and you get a head start on new campaigns which might potentially include Assetz Exchange, a new Brickowner round and p2p lending startup Neo Finance.

Summing up: While there are other sources for shares in p2p lending companies, Seedrs is a good place to start looking.

This article is not an investment advice. Investing in startups bears significant risks, including total loss of investment.

Orca Money to Raise 500K via Equity Crowdfunding – Interview with CEO Iain Niblock

Orca Money is currently running an equity crowdfunding campaign on Seedrs to raise 500K GBP at a premoney valuation of 1.7M GBP. Anybody can invest in Orca Money shares with a minimum investment amount of 10 GBP applicable. I interviewed the Orca CEO Iain Niblock

What is Orca Money about?

Orca is an aggregation platform, allowing investors to invest across a range of peer to peer lending (P2P) platforms, lending sub sectors and a large number of borrowers. We further offer independent investment research, providing confidence to investors when making decisions.

Currently investors are investing directly on P2P platforms. This makes building and managing a diversified portfolio frustrating. We centralise this process by allowing investors to research, build and manage their portfolio from the Orca platform. We provide the P2P platforms with a source of retail investors.

Investors can review the performance of their portfolio, diversify their risk and earn the attractive returns that the sector offers.

What are the three main advantages for investors?

Risk adjusted returns: We offer an investment return to our users which is reduced in risk through diversification. By allowing investors to invest across multiple P2P platforms, lending sectors and a large number of borrowers, we facilitate easy diversification.

Reduced admin burden: Orca manages all fund deployment, email communication and performance data aggregation. Investors can login to their personal Orca dashboard and view a breakdown of their portfolio, as well as an aggregated view of their investment performance.

Automatic portfolio build: Orca has been producing independent analysis on the market for the past three years. We have conducted due diligence in the market and curated a portfolio for investors to invest through. This removes the hassle from P2P investing.

Iain NiblockYou are currently raising money. Who are you raising from and what do you plan to use the capital for?

Our investment is open to the public on the Seedrs equity crowdfunding platform. Investors across the EU can register and invest in the Orca business. The proceeds will allow us to expand our userbase, integrate with more lenders and to further develop the functionality of our platform.

Prior to launching the crowdfunding campaign, we secured a portion of this investment from two institutional funds based in Northern Ireland and a number of leading angel investors. It’s great to be combining these investors with crowd investors.

Why have you selected Seedrs for your equity crowdfunding campaign?

A number of our customers mentioned that they would like to invest in Orca’s business. We’ve gained incredibly valuable feedback from these customers and, ultimately, we wanted to give them an opportunity to own shares in the business. We hope that this campaign will attract further investors and customers to do the same.

Personally, I’ve tracked the equity crowdfunding market closely for many years and I’m now genuinely excited to be leading a campaign. Seedrs was an obvious choice as they have facilitated funding for a number of other P2P platforms.

One benefit of Seedrs is that investors invest through a nominee structure. The Seedrs nominee structure holds and manages the shares on the behalf of the underlying investor. For the investor, this means the nominee can track and monitor shareholder rights as a collective. For the company, this reduces the administrative burden of having a large shareholder base.

Where do you see Orca Money in 3 years?

We aim to evolve into the hub for P2P investment research, investing and portfolio management. Investors will be given access to credit investments across the EU, originated by P2P platforms and other non-bank lenders. The functionality of our platform will increase, delivering a fully functioning investment aggregation platform.

Orca is a differentiated product in a rapidly growing market.

Name one fact that makes your pitch a better investment than any other pitch on Seedrs.

In comparison to other Seedrs pitches we believe our valuation is very good value. This was set by institutional investors based in Northern Ireland where valuations are generally lower than other parts of the UK and in particular London. I’d expect the valuation to rise substantially during any subsequent rounds.

P2P-Banking.com thanks Iain Niblock for the interview.

Investly Plans to Raise 2M GBP on Seedrs – Interview with CEO Siim Maivel

Investly is currently pitching on Seedrs to raise between 500K and 2M GBP in a crowdfunding for equity campaign. To become a shareholder, the required minium investment amount is 13 GBP.

What is Investly about?

Investly is an invoice financing platform which helps businesses from the UK and Estonia release cash from their long payment term invoices. We’re a marketplace that connects investors to companies that need short term capital, which we issue against their receivables. We have offices in London and Tallinn.

What are the three main advantages when investing in the invoices?

Liquidity – Investly is quite different compared to most platforms because the investment period is only 30 to 40 days on average. This means you can convert your investments into cash within a month by simply halting further investments.

Return – Historically investors have earned 11-12% annually on invoices. I believe every investor should have a portion of their funds allocated to P2P investing because of the higher return and additional diversification.

Added value – Invoice finance is helping small businesses who are growing fast but fail to get the support they need from local banks. The direct impact is clear – invoice finance has helped our customers grow faster and create more jobs. This would not be possible without investors.

What are the three main advantages for companies selling the invoices?

Most of all, faster business growth. We discovered that Estonian customers who are leveraging access to working capital are able to grow their turnover by 18.3%, while turnover growth benchmark equals 7.6% (Investly internal analysis, growth benchmark from Statistics Estonia report 2017)
But access to working capital is not just numbers in spreadsheet, but most of all it’s opportunities that business can take: hire more staff and win new contracts, get better supplier payment terms by offering early or up-front payment, ensure prompt payment for employees and subcontractors.

What ROI have investors made on average on the platform in the past?

On average investors have earned double digit returns in both markets. The net return on Estonian invoices has been 11.2% annually and in the UK it’s been 12.6% annually.

What is the procedure, if a company is late in repaying the invoice?

To ensure collection is as fast as possible, we rely on early action and automating notifications to debtors. If the debtor doesn’t pay within 30 days of the due date, we have the right to ask the seller to repurchase the invoice from investors. We also ask for a personal guarantee from one or several of the directors of the seller company. This means that if the company cannot pay, we can ask for payment from the directors.

Investly is the biggest p2p lending marketplace for invoice financing in Estonia. How did you achieve this position?

We use personal approach and always try to find the best solution for our customers and investors. That professional customer service constantly provides us a leverage over banks and competitors. Also, quick decision – we present an offer within one working day. This is something that many of small businesses can’t expect from traditional lenders. On top of that, we have flexible pricing, which we’re able to use thanks to loyal and engaged investors community.

Investly is also operating in the UK. Is it complicated to operate in two different markets simultaneously and which of the two markets is more attractive for future growth?

UK is the largest factoring market in Europe with €327b worth of invoices financed every year. For comparison, France is second with €268b/year and Germany is third with €217b/year. This is where the biggest potential is. However, traditional sales and marketing channels towards our target customers are extremely crowded with thousands of B2B service providers trying to sell them products. We have to be more clever about acquiring customers there. Open Banking enables us to do that.

Estonian businesses finance only €2.5b/year, but due to the connected infrastructure of public and private registries, we can reach our customers much more easily. Also, there’s fewer providers in Estonia and we’re creating a lot of the market ourselves as factoring hasn’t been available for them in the past.

Having built Investly for four years, what do you deem the biggest assets of the company?

We have gained a detailed understanding about the problem we’re solving. It’s not specific to any geography. Businesses across Europe and elsewhere in the world are struggling with the lack of working capital. It seems that our product offering helps to solve that problem more simply than traditional lenders.

Four years is typically a good time to become an expert at something. We have also build a strong team to execute our mission. We’re experts at invoice financing.

Also, we’ve managed to get a good set of advisors on board to help us build the marketplace and secure future rounds of financing if needed.

What role does ‘Open Banking’ play in the near future for Investly’s further development?

Open Banking is a technical enabler. Businesses can now choose freely between their bank and 3rd party providers to solve their specific financial needs. It’s done in a secure and easy-to-use way.

This has gotten banks looking into how they can continue to be profitable in this new environment. Completely new types of business models are emerging and we’re proud that Investly is one of the early pioneers to set the path for others. Being part of the Open Banking sandbox in UK helped us to be one of the first ones to integrate with banks like Barclays, HSBC, RBS, Lloyds and Santander.

We’re going to use these integrations to form partnerships with traditional lenders so we can serve our customer without them necessarily having to change their provider.

You want to raise new funding on Seedrs. Why did you decide to use crowdfunding for equity rather than traditional routes?

Throughout the years we’ve received multiple requests from our marketplace investors to participate in our equity financing round. They’ve been giving us a lot of valuable feedback when we’ve developed our product and directed our credit model. We’d like them to get a chance to be part of Investly mission as we continue to grow.

With traditional equity financing, we’d be overwhelmed by administrative work to get the round closed and to manage those relationships later on. Seedrs has provided a good platform on which we can do that efficiently.

What is the value proposition for investors? Do you aim for a stock market listing? What is the likely time horizon?

Get to participate in our valuation growth. The interest you earn on the marketplace is quite stable, but the potential upside on the equity investment is much higher.

UK based investors can take advantage of the EIS scheme. It’s quite a big incentive on the tax side.

Seedrs provides a secondary market, which helps to create liquidity for our shareholders. This way, you don’t have to wait for years until the startup makes an exit or files for IPO.

Is Investly profitable? If not, when do you expect to reach breakeven on cash flow.

Operationally, we’re quite close to breakeven. The target is to get profitable in core activities in the next 6 months after fundraising round closes. But on a company level we will still be investing heavily into building out the integrations with banks to execute the momentum we’ve managed to build up.

For which activities does Investly intend to raise the used funds?

Partnerships and further automation. Few years ago, all the banks would turn us down when we approached them with suggestion of cooperation. But with Open Banking, this is window of opportunity for both of us: Investly provides working solution with better experience and price for customers, banks acquire competitive leverage on the market and are part of this fintech revolution. Therefore, funds from this round will be used on product developments which will allow us integrate with banks infrastructure and automate our processes even more with the increase in volume.

Where do you see Investly in 3 years?

Investly will be the major provider of invoice finance to businesses across Europe. It’ll be partly through partnerships (invoice finance powered by Investly) and partly through building out our own brand by continuing to deliver superior customer experience.

With that scale, we will have had enough data to build up a narrow AI for credit decisions. We have followed our roadmap for getting there. We’ll be better able to score companies and collect payments than competitors.

Investors will have access to debtors across Europe, which enables them to achieve a good diversification of currencies, countries and sectors.

Once we’ve received that scale, we will be able to deliver the best financing rate to businesses with our marketplace model, where banks are lending alongside with our investor community.

P2P-Banking thanks Siim Maivel for the interview.

Updated Jan. 23rd: A previous version of this article stated 2.5M as upper limit of the fundraise. That figure was incorrect.

Investly pitch video on Seedrs

 

Crowdproperty Pitches to Raise 600K GBP through Equity Crowdfunding

UK p2p lending marketplace Crowdproperty is currently pitching on Seedrs to raise 600K GBP from the crowd at a pre-money valuation of 5.9M GBP.

The Crowdproperty marketplace was launched in 2014 and the company has since funded 10.7 million GBP in property loans. All loans are secured by a first legal charge against the property. The company says no investor has incurred any losses so far. The company received full FCA authorization in October 2017.

Crowdproperty states it has unique proprietary access to the largest property network in the UK, the Property Investors Network (pin), which provides competitive advantage in terms of high quality deal origination and has enabled the proof of the business with limited marketing investment to date.

Crowdproperty claims that it’ is already profitable with more favourable economics than peer to peer platforms in consumer and SME marketplaces owing to shorter average loan lengths, higher average loan sizes, borrower frequency/retention and achievability/sustainability of fee levels. With a gulf now emerging between property-based peer to peer lenders that are gaining traction versus those struggling at the sub-£5m level, the team aims to become the market leader in project-based finance direct to SME property professionals whilst simultaneously providing competitive first-charge secured returns to its retail pool of lenders.

CEO Simon Zutschi told P2P-Banking: ‘I am delighted that we have now proven this model of helping successful property developers to fund their projects, whilst helping investors gain a secured return on their money. All of the recent project launches have been quickly funded up by our eager and loyal base of lenders, which clearly demonstrates the traction we have built in our brand. Over the last year, we have focused on our platform technology and processes, and now we are ready to scale this business to its full potential. This will not only benefit our lenders, but also help and support SME developers, who often struggle to raise funds from hesitant banks, to access the essential funding they need to help reduce the UK housing crisis’.

(Source: Crowdproperty pitch on Seedrs)