Well I think access to 60-100 million trumps 4 million. They don’t have time to lose
Agreed. Adam has said that they are exploring a larger round, aiming to close by the end of the year. Absolutely this is necessary. They need firepower to compete and simply go faster. Money = Speed. Plus I think a couple of experienced board members would be welcomed by all investors.
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This is necessary. But I believe there is the market there for Robinhood, Freetrade and T212 to all be successful.
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I completely agree.
Freetrade - Friendly, long-term
Robinhood - Techie, high risk
T212 - Jack of all trades (pun not intended)
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What is T212?? I googled and nothing came up
Sorry, I just abbreviated Trade 212. It’s mostly a CFD platform with forex, crypto and share spin offs
edit: @AlexR explained it much better below
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Trading 212.
They offer CFD, a GIA and ISA.
Their GIA (called ‘Invest’) and ISA are essentially the same as Freetrade. They offer instant free trades for no fee - though the minimum buy amount can vary ie you might need to buy 2 shares to make the trade.
If you want a join them you can message me and I’ll give you a link for a free share.
My personal preference is Freetrade because of the community involvement. But I think all of these players can succeed and I’ll likely have accounts with all as I’m a fintech nerd.
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Freetrade are positioned nicely enough to take institutional funding by ~July 2020 at latest. VCs care alot about growth - Freetrade have done well on user growth, if Active user growth and revenues have done the same, VCs will certainly be interested, though theyll be more aggresive with valuation (expect dilution) and terms (liquidation preference, etc) than the crowd was. Post from CEO Adam Dodds in the last crowdfunding round below:
If we assume the intended VC is an EIS fund (as the crowdfund update/email screenshot below suggests) and sole investor, the investment will be a maximum of £6m (knowledge intensive early stage companies can raise £10m yearly, £4m of which was allocated in the crowdfund).
The value of having a VC is capital, of course, and a well networked, experienced institution that can help with growth, key hires, etc. My hope is that freetrade can leverage this for help in talent acquisition especially. The best EIS funds imo are calculus capital and Mercia, both of whom have invested in financial services/Software before.
Also worth mentioning is that if freetrade can only raise ~£7m a year through crowdfunding without having to create a prospectus (a complex financial document that can cost hundreds of thousands of £s to make…) for those wondering about the likelihood/mechanics of a crowd round in the next year.
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Thank you for that information.
Don’t go anywhere near them, awful daytrading app.
Can you point me to some examples of Mercia being a good administrator of EIS funds?
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Just to clarify i’m speaking in terms of the fund’s value-add to freetrade, not as an investment outright. But honestly, I put 5 seconds into writing this. I saw they won Best EIS investment manager @ the 2017 Growth Investor awards (I concede that’s simply vanity), had recent activity in financials/SaaS and thought they’d be a good fit for freetrade.
Would be interesting to hear what EIS funds you’re fond of/why; Any favourites? I’ve always considered the fees too high to justify investing, so I haven’t really taken much note of them tbh.
Wow, that was scary. 
But full set of accounts provided today:
I’ll tell you where I am coming from regarding Nutmeg. They done a CrowdCube raise and it is the worst raise I have ever seen. They answered zero questions and since then I feel it’s only a matter of time​:scream:
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It might still be😱 in 5 days time
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Difficulties you say?
‘Group attracts strong financial backing despite never having made a profit’
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Without wanting to go wildly off topic… the 85,000 nutmeg customer base figure quoted is interesting when compared to a crowd deduced figure of ~60,000 Freetrade customers, and a self reported 200,000 figure for Moneybox.
Particularly interesting when marketing accounted for 33% of 2018 costs as quoted in the article.
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Just wait for 2019 results,that my friend is when the s**t will truly hit the fan.
I’m amazed Balderton has been so bullish with them