company house website
I wonder if any of these collapsed start ups had the following. I know this is just for good pitch decks but the highlighted elements seem to be inherent for success
All that says to me is that my 6000 Freetrade shares will in time quite easily reach ÂŁ20 a share as they seem to tick all the boxes. Yipeeee!
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Weâre all rooting for Freetrade shares to go the moon 
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The thing that makes me happiest is the fact that the money from annual subscriptions should be enough to comfortably extend the runway and an added bonus is no further dilution(for the moment)
This is the only one I was really prepared to continue investing in.
About ÂŁ2,500 in it so far.
Dire that this one is going down.
Despite what some are saying they shouldnât have trouble funding.
Canadian provinces willing to give them money to start up there.
Odd they are struggling and likely to fail. Like to know why the institute is pulling out?
Will fund with a maximum of ÂŁ100 not prepared to pull money out of the market. On what on the face of it appears to be a looser.
Great pity.
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Small Robot Company anticipated raise details.
ÂŁ13M pre-money seems high to me, given the risks involved in investing in this emergency raise.
Taken from the email from Small Robot Company:
â Valuation
ÂŁ13m pre-money - effectively a 30% âdiscountâ from our last post money valuation
â Tax Relief
The round should be EIS eligible
â CLN event
It would be be a conversion event, triggering the Convertible Loan Note
â Direct investment
Without time to go via a crowdfunding site, investments will be made direct via a rights issue. The good news is you will be able to avoid any platform fees.
Small robot company
BBC radio talk
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I think itâs a fair valuation to also keep the founders motivated and going in a tough market and situation. I donât think going too low would have helped in any way. Between that and the fact that itâs EIS eligible you can consider that as a further valuation discount. I am always keen to keep the team motivated and hungry and with the eyes on a potential payout as the âchancing the worldâ motivation will only take you so far.
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I will invest but less than I was considering. Not enough of a discount given their issues and reliance on the crowd, also their previous valuAtion in todayâs world was inflated given the focus on value rather than growth. Lots of companies are being down valued even though they are strong so would have expected a bigger discount.
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Email just received.
Note I am only putting in ÂŁ100. The pledge was less than ÂŁ500
"thank you for pledging <ÂŁ500
You have joined our community pledging over ÂŁ1.1m!
74% of the ÂŁ1.5mp asked for.
I donât believe they need to get all the way to 1.5 million as they could easily have another round.
How many funding rounds has freetrade had?
Valuation feels fair for a company that developed a fully functioning robot, tested it with loads of partners and have an oversubscribed pipeline, another 2 robots that are in tests, a fully functioning weed mapping software for one of the biggest industries around.
Robotics is notoriously hard to develop and the advance they have had is very impressive. Are they good sales people, should they seriously re-consider their management and leadership or think of ways to improve that fast - maybe.
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Valuations are subjective⌠You think it is fair and I think it is not, which is no issue. Yes, they have done good work but they still have hurdles to get past to start delivering significant turnover and we are in a value orientated world, where growth is a past story.
Ultimately, VCs also have to-date chosen to not invest at this valuation - unless I am mistaken this is all from the crowd pledges, despite holding conversations with VCs?
If I am correct then interested to understand why VCs have not invested at this valuation even at a lower amount, given they were interested and now it is a lower entry point meaning less risk on the table. One assumption is that it is not attractive enough with the valuation at this levelâŚ
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Fair enough although I think the valuation was not the issue as similarly to how they offered us a discount they could/would have done for the VC no difference. Interesting one to follow and see where it lands.
Youâd have to be coo coo bananas to invest in Small Robot Co given their circumstance. The pitch alone is all of the evidence required: theyâre proposing that if they raise âonlyâ ÂŁ1.5 million they can survive long enough to⌠raise more money, and only if they raise ÂŁ3m can they begin to make progress. So, even in their wildest dreams, even in a pitch that is in its very nature speculative and ambitious, they are declaring that their wildest dream is⌠surviving long enough to raise more money (which theyâve failed to do already, hence, this desperate raise).
The company is destined to fail, they know it, and the reason theyâre raising money is to give their employees a softer landing. The obvious outcome of this raise is that all of their employees start looking for new jobs because company morale will be through the floor: the directors have demonstrated beyond any doubt that they cannot be trusted to provide security to their employees.
Since thereâs EIS involved, the downside isnât too bad, and if youâve got money to burn, the fight-the-vc-man narrative is fun to take part in, but anybody investing in this round should understand that the money they put into this round is just going to pay for the employees to find new jobs.
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Absolutely. We also do not know how much the founders pay theirselves with our money, even if they have recently taken cuts. Have they invested their own funds to keep the company afloat, perhaps in exchange for equity?
If they believe in the project that much this should have happened by now if possible (not saying it hasnât, as I do not know). VCs on the board would ensure better governance, which I feel has been sorely missing here.
Their honesty is appreciated but honesty doesnât deliver returns. They should have foreseen this risk and taken steps considerably earlier to mitigate against it.
If VCs are not prepared to invest then why should the crowd?! Especially if the price is not at an even lower point to compensate for the additional risk.
If this round was a CLN/ASA then at least it would rank higher as debt in the event of winding up, but I think this is straight equity again so unlikely beyond loss relief to get anything back.
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Does your view include investments in freetrade?
How many funding rounds have they had?
Common sense says this type of investment is very very long road.
At least the Canadian provinces are prepared to invest via subsidies. Are they coo coo bananas as well?
I would be surprised if they didnât need considerabley more funding.
Ignoring the income they are already receiving from customers.
John Deere etc etc are investing in the same area.
Are they coo coo bananas as well?
Raising capital during the early stages of a business is very normal. The problem with Small Robot Company is the contradiction. Theyâre wildly successful, they have a waiting list of ÂŁ9m in ARR, they have hundreds of potential customers invested in the company, they have technology in the field⌠and yet, theyâre cap in hand begging for anybody who will listen to throw them a few quid so they can⌠survive long enough to keep their cap in hand, hoping someone blesses them with even more money?
If any of what they were saying is true, they would have dozens of creative funding options, they would not need to shout from the rooftops that their business is so unstable that any farmer that considers buying their product may end up with a very expensive paperweight at a moments notice. A significant concern for any industrial user of technology is ongoing support, any industrial user will already be anxious about trusting new technology from a new company, so to loudly proclaim just how fragile the company is, itâs sabotaging oneself.
The website and deck could be picked apart for inconsistencies and falsehoods, for example, they claim that building this technology would cost ÂŁ10m (page 4) and then claim theyâve spent ÂŁ12m on page 28. They claim that their VC investors ââŚfind agriculture too riskyâŚâ but the business apparently already has ÂŁ9m in committed ARR? The risk to the VCs is, what, theyâll make too much money and wonât know where to spend it?
Survival as an early-stage business is a balancing act, and almost running out of money and surviving by the skin of their teeth isnât inherently problematic, but given the contradictions, and the signal this sends to their potential customers, itâs difficult to even begin to imagine how the company can survive long term.
The directors of Small Robot Company go into their office every day, they sit with their employees, hear about their families, their childrenâs first steps, they attend birthday parties, discuss ambitions, dreams, struggles, and then they watch the blood drain from their employeeâs faces when they hear that the company canât make payroll at a time when most people are already extremely anxious about the nationwide economic situation. The crowd investors are just a bunch of faceless wallets, investing money that they can âafford to loseâ and so it doesnât take any leap at all for the founders of Small Robot Company to sincerely believe that raising money to give their employees a soft landing is the right thing to do, and if they need to stretch the truth when talking to the crowd, or even themselves, to give that to their employees, then so be it.
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How you can compare Freetrade to SRC? They are disrupting different industries, one has a much quicker route to market and one is riddled with complexities.
Freetrade was not really one of the first to disrupt on the same scale as SRC has tried to do - in my opinion. I think they did not realise how much funding it would take to achieve their dream of disrupting.
All in all I do want to recognise the passionate discussion around this - definitely a healthy debate which I hope the SRC team is also reading through.
One thing I think - to some of the above points - that would be good for SRC to put forward/consider is a board seat or on observing seat to be made available to the Crowd seeing they are looking at them to save them and considering all the money and the % that represents of the company now or post this round.
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