The European startup ecosystem is booming. It has attracted more than $14.4bn of venture funding in the last four quarters, the highest in 5 years. A major factor fuelling this growth is a higher-resolution venture finance industry, which has opened up the traditional Venture Capital (VC) space to new types of equity investors: angels, accelerators and micro-VCs. At the same time, the emergence of equity-based crowdfunding (i.e. securities offered to investors, often non-professional ones, through an online intermediary) as an increasingly prevalent capital-raising channel is further disrupting early-stage investing. This popularisation of market access provides vital capital underpinnings to businesses across the maturity spectrum and has been a centrepiece of economic growth for EU policy makers.
Supporting innovative ways of diversifying the funding sources for European businesses is crucial to improving growth and job creation. The European Commission believes that venture finance, including crowdfunding, has the potential to bring significant benefits to the EU economy in terms of jobs and growth, by providing an alternative funding source for start-ups, SMEs and unlisted companies. The European Commission estimates that €4.2 billion was successfully raised through crowdfunding platforms in 2015 in the EU, compared with €1.6 billion in 2014.
As with any type of investment, the promotion of the benefits of venture finance needs to be pursued in parallel with ensuring appropriate safeguards. The risks inherent in venture financing are common to those more generally related to investing in unlisted shares or bonds and can also manifest themselves in the context of the crowdfunding business model and are exacerbated by the fact that many aspects of the investment ecosystem remain opaque. This is particularly true for equity funding of early-stage companies – defined for the purpose of this project as companies that have raised less than €10 million of capital.
Institutional venture finance investors have both the experience and the resources (capital, staff and professional tools) to navigate this opaque landscape. On the other hand, individual investors (“angel investors”) face three crucial challenges: 1) they lack experience; according to Nesta, 62% of UK angel investors have no investing background; 2) they lack access to relevant and reliable data; 3) they lack the time, resources and expertise to properly research companies. Consequently, they tend to invest based effectively on marketing materials, forming their view as consumers of the product/service rather than as investors in the business.
Investment/angel networks and crowdfunding platforms, which present opportunities to investors and charge startups a percentage of the funding they secure, face similar challenges. Their success – and reputation – is strongly correlated to the quality of the deal flow. Yet angel networks are usually resource constrained, which prevents them from properly screening and qualifying opportunities. As a result, many of them struggle to 1) sustain investor interest and 2) secure funding for startups. Meanwhile, crowdfunding platforms are under increasing pressure to ensure investors have access to objective information about the companies fundraising.
Finally, startups themselves face an uphill battle when trying to secure funding. Amidst a surge in the number of startups being created, it is very hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. The problem is particularly acute for European startups not close to the large investor pools of the UK, France and Germany. As an example, we have come across business incubators and accelerators from Central Europe struggling to credentialize themselves and their companies to Western European investors, despite an abundance of talent in the region. Lack of transparency limits the volume of cross-border project funding and constrains the reach of crowdfunding to regional or local levels.
It is our belief that these factors result in significant misallocation of capital, hindering the ability of the European SME ecosystem to expand optimally. Crowd Analytics is a first-of-its-kind large-scale data analytics and visualisation platform that helps investors assess the risk profile and investment-readiness of early-stage companies. The system collects structured and unstructured data from a number of public and private sources, correlates them using proprietary algorithmic analysis, deduces relevant insights and presents them to the user in an intuitive and structured manner.
In this context, the overall objectives of the project were, firstly, to assess the demand for such a product from a range of potential target user categories and research user acquisition strategies. Based on user feedback, we aimed to refine the product positioning & roadmap, determine the optimal monetisation strategy and develop detailed financial plan. Finally, we aimed to Identify potential channel partners, develop an IP management strategy and determine risks and mitigants for successful commercialisation.
The conclusions of the action support our thesis that there is demand for such a product, and we identified a range of features that need to be implemented in order for the product to stand out versus competing offerings. The most significant challenge is building a product whose data and analytics are trusted by industry participants. This requires amassing a comprehensive and reliable dataset that can be harnessed contextually and transparently. Our overarching success factor will be to build a system that can be entrusted to harvest data reliably and at scale.
