I stopped Early this year , as I figured they were taking us for a “ride”.
You invest in a Company and 6 months-1 year later, they say they are going into administration.
Totally agree, and although I’ve previously disparaged Chip I may as well join in again because they’re uniquely positioned to implode during any form of market downturn:
- Their business succeeds when retail investors are flush with cash
- Their funding strategy succeeds… when retail investors are flush with cash
- They’re deeply unprofitable (i.e: >50% headcount reduction wouldn’t bring them into profitability)
- Their plan as of a few months ago is to raise multiple times per year, including many millions in the next few months
- Their most recent raise was all about Alternative Assets (which are only valuable in the frothiest of markets) and crypto which were going to “rocket [their] growth” (their crypto product hasn’t launched, and crypto is, well… no words needed)
- Their “we’re about to raise a big institutional round” narrative is so overplayed by this point that even if we weren’t in a market downturn they’re burning goodwill with their crowd investors
- A lot of customers have abandoned them because their rates are no longer competitive: even MoneySavingExpert has relegated them, they don’t even appear on the savings recommendations after this blistering article which proclaimed most people should “Ditch Chip”
If Chip manage to survive, it’ll be a miracle. As Buffet said:
…we’ll be staring at Chip’s shivering cheeks soon enough.
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Posting here because of the Crowdcube secondary… 6 months ago…
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Any thoughts on a different Fintech - Plum?
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That is an insane down round. Im not sure whats more absurd. The previous valuation or the current one
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Very good user experience. They are struggling to monetise their users base.
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There’s a Bolt (transport app) secondary coming to Crowdcube 
Bolt’s last valuation was at the start of the year at $8.4 billion.
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I have expressed an interest for a nominal amount in the Bolt secondary, just out of curiosity.
The app is number 4 in the Travel charts on the iOS app store, but the written reviews are almost all one or two star ratings.
Unless this is priced at a very steep discount, I’ll probably not be investing.
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I feel like Uber has showed us that ride-hailing is just not a profitable business with human drivers. Bolt pays their drivers even more afaik (or takes fewer %), so no idea how this will ever work out.
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I really hope they offer a discount comparable to the tech sell off.
Would be disappointing if CC exposed crowd / retail investors to an overpriced secondary in this climate.
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Didn’t the Klarna secondary fall through? I vaguely remember CC emailing mentioning some issues with progressing the secondary??
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Yes, the secondary campaign for Klarna on CC was canceled.
Has anyone here taken a look a 3TI on Crowdcube?
I’m waiting access to the full documents but it’s got me interested. £16m pre valuation is high given life time turn over of £7.8m but this looks like the sort of thing that could scale quickly.
Any thoughts?
Great post, I also have a background in the field. I agree with your take & answers from management also seem to confirm there’s no product-solution fit as of yet and I’m also finding it hard to see how RareCan could materially contribute to the real opportunity out there: making clinical trials cheaper.
Whilst I agree on your comment on healthcare investing, I do believe that startups that improve efficiency in bringing new products to market offer an attractive opportunity to play into the trends in healthcare (personalized medicine, biotech, etc) with much lower development risk. Sadly I’ve only so far found 1 company fitting the profile the last 1+ year, I guess the good ones are for the VCs in this space…
3ti seems to be multiple businesses bolted together. There’s a charge point business, a solar business, and a battery storage business.
Why not just do that separately and at greater scale, rather than combine the 3 and compromise everywhere?
I feel like you’d make more money if you put three times the density of solar cells in a farmer’s field using generic products rather than designing bespoke covered car park charge pods.
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Looks like this happened 
quoting oneself is gauche, but looks like it’s happening already. Just today Chip have quietly started laying people off, today their Head of Cyber Security, a Test Chapter Lead, Head of Copy and some engineers, amongst others, are gone.
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You certainly love to break any negative news regarding Chip! Very interesting??
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This looks like an interesting concept especially for busy people albeit yes you could just arrange via whatsapp, meetup so etc…
Keen to get input from the community on this one 