Seedups, a crowdfunding site conceived in Northern Ireland
Seedups, the Northern Ireland-based intelligent crowdfunding site, now has an investment pool of €26m (stg£23m) available for disruptive tech start-ups to connect with investors.
With it being Global Entrepreneurship Week, Seedups is highlighting its investment pool that’s available for tech businesses.
Michael Faulkner founded the crowdfunding site in 2010 as a means of linking the best tech start-ups with tech-savvy investors.
Think of projects like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, in which crowdfunding proved to be a successful means of raising money. However, Seedups has taken crowdfunding to the next level, creating a platform concentrating on equity investments for tech start-ups.
“We know that tech companies are the ones with the greatest scale, but most ideas stall in their infancy, and we know that crowdfunding can help this,” said Faulkner this morning.
The Seedups concept focused on the need to give start-ups in the tech space a fair valuation and ensure that companies can gain access to the funding they need to survive.
Seedups uses a ‘wisdom of crowd’ matching engine to give a fair valuation of a start-up’s worth. Investors compete with microbids to ensure they are part of the equity deal, and tools are in place to ensure that investors can network and conduct collective due diligence on various start-ups and place bids on projects. It is free to register for both parties.
Since going live in February of this year, Seedups has attracted nearly 900 entrepreneurs and nearly 400 investors from the US, UK and Ireland.
Michael Faulkner, founder of Seedups. Faulkner also founded EuroXchanger Currency Services in 2005 to compete with the banks for currency services
“We knew there was a gap in the funding cycle for disruptive tech-based entrepreneurs and we also knew that angel investors were struggling to find enough opportunities to fulfil their investment goals, so Seedups was born from that,” said Faulkner.
Faulkner spoke about how Seedups uses an evolved approach to crowdfunding, which has been thrust into the spotlight since it was highlighted by US President Barack Obama when launching his recent Jobs Bill.
Seedups was originally conceived in 2008 as an online matching engine for early stage entrepreneurs and the burgeoning global business angel investor community at the time. In 2009 and 2010, the company identified a sizable market opportunity and developed a patent-pending prototype matching engine that employs the ‘wisdom of crowd’ methodology to facilitate a fair valuation for entrepreneurs.
This week, Seedups is going to be at the Business Startup Show in Earls Court, London, talking to entrepreneurs about how crowdfunding can help their businesses.
