Freetrade's $15m Series A funding - Q&A

Sorry if Iā€™ve missed this announcement elsewhereā€¦

Including $7.5m from Draper Esprit.

Would be great to have a little more details about this new investment? e.g. what valuation DE are buying in at / if they have any preferential class of shares etc.

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The round includes a $7.5 million investment from Draper Esprit, the U.K. publicly-listed venture capital firm, along with previously announced equity crowdfunding via Crowdcube.

I read this as no valuation change?

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Agree - sounds like they are considering the latest crowdfund as part of the same round. Interested if DE have managed to negotiate any special terms on their shares. Has happened to me recently with other crowd funding investments!

We knew it was coming. It had to for freetrade to survive. For us investors if freetrade is actually going to make any money in the long run it needs to push on fast or it will be swallowed by competition and we will all be out of pocket.

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This is a useful website for anyone wondering what it all means.

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GREAT NEWS!!!

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Great news. Looking forward to seeing more details of the series a.

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Letā€™s see if this does anything positive to Draperā€™s price. Iā€™m certain they could publish a 10x return on all their investments and itā€™d still go down :sweat_smile:

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I must say that while I welcome the VC investment but disappointed to learn that VC got the same valuation as Crowdcube last round. When R4 was abruptly closed (no fault of investors) and R5 was opened in 2 months time, we paid higher price and justification from FT was that things have changed e.g. higher customer numbers. If that is true then the same concept should have applied to VC joining after few months of R5, when more customers have joined. This is not fair @adam @Viktor

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Maybe the deal was done around that time and is only being announced now. Even if not, at this stage of the business, having more runway seems like a good thing.

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Congratulations team, this is fantastic news :pray:t2:

Excited for everything to come.

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I think not giving a VC a 50% discount could be seen as a bonus. Often backers want a big slice of the pie.

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Iā€™ll be posting an open shareholder letter on our blog next week explaining in more detail what this means for Freetradeā€™s future.

Best to enjoy the announcement and Draper Esprit joining the family. The deal came together at the same time as our latest crowdfunding, but for various reasons we needed to wait for hard completion to announce.

Our customers/shareholders/community really made this happen.

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I thought this would be the big announcement. Great news! Freetrade have been expanding their team at a rate which I thought required VC funds.

Iā€™m happy with the valuation. I was becoming wary of my Freetrade investment due to every brokerage moving to zero commission.

A reminder that Draper is available on Freetrade.

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I want to echo @tinku333 here. I am a happy investor and I think that the VC money is great, however the same valuation seems unfair given the points Tinku mentions and Freetrade hasnā€™t really indicated if the terms are different surrounding preference/guranteed return clauses which VCs often stipulate.

Most importantly though, I donā€™t feel that the ā€˜crowdā€™ and especially this community is being valued by Freetrade given the marketing reach and early support we have offered. The fact that the communication wasnā€™t posted on the community by @Viktor or the Freetrade team at 7am when it seems the embargo was lifted is really disappointing and now we have to wait for an open letter next week.

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Congratulations, great work. Slow and steady!

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This is great news. Congrats.

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