I managed to stay clear of that oneā¦good decision with hindsight
Only invested my smallest amount in these guys as I was kind of curious to see the model. But however small a loss, itās always a little annoying.
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And it seems like Monva appointed administrators but did not even communicate with CrowdCube to let investors knowā¦.that is shocking conduct from their directors.
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The lack of regard for their investors it terrible, would it be so hard to send an email? They only closed the over last round in December 2021 taking Ā£439k.
HMRC Filing
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So it looks like there is desire for a database like this. What fields would you add?
Company Name
Director names (if known)
Funding Raised (if known)
Number of funding rounds
Date of administration / sale
EIS / SEIS claimable?
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Exactly. Itās times like this I wish legal action would be taken. If we find that the IP is bought by a pre-pack that the directors are linked in, Iāll go nuts.
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Trading name as well as Company name
Directors Status as well as Name (Current/Resigned)
Date of Share issue to calculate EIS disposal eligibility
Status of Companies House Filings
Funding Platform
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These are all good suggestions. Optimistically, itād be nice to collect data to eventually build a more complete scorecard. The challenge is that the more inputs we ask for the less likely it is people will bother filling them in. Also from experience Iāve seen that qualitative judgements can be highly predictive but they require clear guidance and even training to achieve consistency- perhaps too ambitious for a crowdsourced effort!
Vague ideas:
- Co-investment from established VC? (Yes | No)
- Founders and team have relevant experience or qualifications? (Yes | No)
- Directors have undisclosed prior defaults? (Yes | No)
- Stage of development for key product? ( Design | Prototype | Testing | Scaling )
- Detail in disclosure of current financials? (None | Minimal (e.g. revenue and assets only) | Good)
- Something on quality of financial projections. ( Not sure how to assess in a consistent manner- but letās face it, weāve all seen forecasts that scream BS!)
- Other red flags observed? (if yes then free text comment)
Retrospectively compiling these answers risks introducing hindsight bias- only possible for new pitches.
Also, we should be aware a historic list might have the survivorship bias problem mentioned earlier in the thread (because CrowdCube deleted the obvious frauds)- probably a minor problem though.
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Hi Neil, I would like to add a few fields that I use on my own personal spreadsheet company description (brief e.g. Automation Software), industry, location, VC appointed (yes/no), business model, pre-money valuation (if known), equity, amount raised (by close of round), Convertible (yes/no), communication levels (poor, good, excellent, non-existent etc). Of course choose what you feel is applicable. Thank you. R
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This should be a community led project so if anyone has a spreadsheet we could always retool it to take Google forms inputs?
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Another one for the graveyard; Sourced Market, who you may know if youāve ever used St Pancras station, is seeking to wind up the business with a voluntary liquidation.
One of my earlier Crowdcube investments back in 2018, and the first failure in my portfolio.
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Great coffee but super niche and would have been hard to scaleā¦.very premium prices.
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Not an investor but heard Havebike from seedrs has just entered administration. Looks like another one is gonna bite the dust.
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The Monva founders have just started working somewhere new. Absolutely no comms to investors to explain how/why the business failed, to explain why having raised only a few months ago, they collapsed. Diabolical behaviourā¦.
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easyProperty. Unfortunately, their campaign details are not accessible to non-shareholders anymore so youād have to buy shares on the secondary market to access the information, but in summary:
- They license the
easybrand from Stelios Haji-Ioannou (founder of easy) - Stelios Haji-Ioannou āinvestsā Ā£200k into the campaign to make the campaign look exciting
- The governmentās āFuture Fundā matches the investment
- Stelios gets his āinvestmentā funnelled right back to him through licensing fees (~Ā£100k was already owed to him for licensing at the time of the campaign with many more hundreds of thousands to be owed over the coming years)
Although the campaign āraisedā Ā£800k, it was actually less than Ā£100k from the crowd and >Ā£700k came from Stelios + Future Fund + founders. That wasnāt a one-off, itās part of the easy playbook, youāll see quite a few easy branded companies going through crowdfunding and theyāre all doing the same thing, although less egregious now since the Future Fund is done.
The related parties aspect of the very same campaign was also pretty ridiculous. Someone had shared concerns on the discussion forum about the history of easyProperty, and then a fellow member of the crowd called Robin Maxwell appeared on the forum to provide some helpful insight:
So helpful! And he makes a great point, Stelios is investing a lot of money (Ā£200k!) so it must be a great investment. Everyone should invest! And David, the founder of easyProperty sure agreed:
Well, youāll never believe it: Robin Maxwell was running the campaign for easyProperty! Quelle surprise! He was being paid to run the Seedrs campaign, which he bragged about on LinkedIn and eventually admitted in the same discussion thread.
All of their behaviour was reported to Seedrs, and of course, Seedrs were fine with it, totally appropriate conduct apparently. The campaign finished and theyāre still on the Seedrs platform today. That all happened in the open, just imagine what the people smart enough to not get caught are doing to rinse the crowd. How many big investments on Seedrs are genuine? How many people in the discussion forums are genuine?
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Blatant misleading at the least because material information is not disclosed, Iām not a legal expert but this sure smells like fraud, right?
On another note, brokers have to assess suitability as far as I know, how is it possible everyone can buy this crap? Itās becoming clear you need certain expertise to sift through all the bad onesā¦ I mean I want to keep this stuff open to everyone, but if the broker doesnāt DD it, how can it stay open to all?
Funny example: I just looked at āAshley Black Experienceā on WeFunder (okay the name screams no-no too) that loaned the founder/CEO $1.5m and $80k in 2021 and put it as a capital investment in marketing, aka does not show up on EBITDA so this one is āprofitableā. Turns out there was like $3.6m and $450K outstanding on two credit facilities for the CEO at the end of 2021 and then you go to crowdfunding for more capital! 
Looks like CommuterClub is about to bite the dust
https://www.commuterclub.co.uk/
Unsurprising. Totally killed by lockdowns of course. They went down to a skeleton crew during lockdown, their CEO left, but I hoped that they preserved enough cash to see it through. Even now weāre past lockdowns though, daily rail commuting still isnāt at a level it was before - annual tickets at a far lower level than pre-pandemic. Most of their customers will have left, which means expensive customer acquisition costs.
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Stay safe is exiting, looks like a 4.3x return since 2015 which is OK I suppose. I invested Ā£10 so not making me rich.
First you hear though is a docusign from the solicitor, followed up a day before the deadline by a limited explanation from the company.
I might roll it into an AIM stock on freetrade to keep BR, in the hope that I will one day have an IHT problem to mitigate!
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Congrats on the exit!
So I think that equals ~23% IRR over 7 years.
Would be nice to compare that to investing in the S&P500 or NASDAQ since 2015 and compare IRR
Edit: ~9.6% for the S&P500 over 7 years to todays price.
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