he/she is selling Ā£8m on the secondary in one goā¦ It makes sense to give a discount
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Giving discount is very common for secondary sales due to lack of liquidity.
Has anyone used wefunder.com?
And what does people think of
https://wefunder.com/active.safety.system.technologies.llc
I see graphene composites have research and development partnership with them
Hello @evcar 
Yes I have invested in 40+ companies via Wefunder over the past 4 years. A few others on here have also invested in a number of opportunities and may also comment. Lots of really good ones on there but you need to have patience for the right ones and filter through the large amounts of garbageā¦.
Havenāt looked at this one. What has drawn you towards this one?
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Hi @TickTock
I have been following graphene for awhile this company sounds promising because it can show/ has shown what graphene can do (protect in different ways vtol/ cars, vans ect with out Makeing the vehicle heavy)
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Thanks - will check it out 
Good luck out there 
Graphene Composites seems like a good company. They have a very strong CEO who has consistently impressed me over the years. Heās sharp, articulate, knows his science and accounts very well, and seems intent on building enterprise value.
I like that they have parallel initiatives around graphene exploitation (armour, composites, energy and health), as if any prove sound the results could be enormous.
Iāve invested in 5 rounds over 5 years with GC, and will continue to support them.
One thing worth calling out - particularly in a landscape of private company CEOs who neglect respectful IR after tapping into crowd capital - is that the GC CEO is great at consistent IR comms, at least quarterly.
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Having mostly given up on crowdfunding, I did top up my Graphene Composite investment in the most recent round, I feel they are one of the few that are making real progress
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I think its great people are sharing their investments. Iāll share my notes if you share yours. In this type of investing its really hard to get experience first hand because it takes years for a startup actually get to a point where you can post mortem it or learn from its success. With so many startups looking for dumb money, it makes all our returns better if we do share what weāre doing. Obviously the golden rule remains; do your own due dilligence.
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Not investment advice of course, but I quite like the sustainable accelerator fund and wanted to share my experience: Sustainable Accelerator 5 | EIS Crowdfunding Campaign | Seedrs
You wonāt know what exactly youāre investing in, but your investment will be split up between approx 7 or 8 SEIS or EIS startups, and the startups are looked after in the accelerator/incubator programme. Plus - they will have an environmental/sustainable angle to their business model.
Thereās a steep carry fee (seedrs and the fund itself), but I think the due diligence that is done on the investorās behalf by the fund and the incubator programme increases the odds significantly that the startups will survive/thrive compared to stand alone startup investments.
This particular fund is raising for one more week or so, they do a new raise every year.
Over the last 5 years Iāve invested in approx 40 startups (most outside of Sustainable Accelerator) and have just had my first exit through a company in a previous round from Sustainable Accelerator (Zeigo), ironically before 3 years so lost my EIS benefit unfortunately. Most of my investments are still going, and only 4 or so have fallen so far.
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Nice sharing and IMO believe this is an excellent approach 
Iāve started doing the same myself over here in the US in the past 12 months via one called AstraLabs and the Wefunder XX fund (quarterly $5K intake across 7-10 companies out of 100ās applicants screened with every company getting a $50-100K investment). These are seriously early stage / conceptual only in some cases but this is where the serious coin can be made, although time will tell of course 
Personally think this is the way forward with more and more people wanting to invest in these & ETFs to compliment investments in individual start ups (which can be extremely difficult to pick winners unless you are both a genius and very lucky)
@Marlinn Absolutely, we need all the help we can get and Iāll continue sharing as it seems to be well received by all, well apart from the well known FT forum troll. Itāll take more than some abuse from them to put me off. Such a shame that we have to waste our time working around this guy instead of using that time sharing productive / value add materialsā¦.
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Looked at it quite thoroughly & went through most of their PortCos, looks good and legit. With EIS I believe its a very appealing concept. I however donāt have EIS and without that it looks OK. One of the comments show their results without tax incentives;
ā1. The non-tax adjusted IRRās for Funds 1-3 are: 27%, 13% and 6% respectively. However, this includes companies which have not raised or which have failed (1 company). The IRRās for funds 1-3, only including companies that have raised is 27%, 37% and 79% respectively (non-tax adjusted). It is worth noting that the Fund 1 IRR is the most accurate IRR as all companies have raised.ā
Seems okay, loss ratio is quite good. Looking at their first fund, performance seems decent (note that this is gross IRR, my guesstimate net IRR would be like 17-20% ), but 2 remarks on this. 1)Theres little realisation, thus we can expect some zombies amongst the PortCos which will drive returns down, and 2) have to remember that they have the trend with them (ClimateTech); Iām not too sure whether such results can stand up against āreal VCsā; in my understanding, more or less everyone in this field is doing great. Not trying to say its unimpressive, just pointing out that performance is not only the skill of SA, but also markets overall. Given more competition in coming years, thats important to factor in. Anyway, Iām not sure whether risk/return wise this is superior to public markets or a tech PE trust like Hg given the much higher risk (note that Iām also not sure about my own skills beating public markets, lol). My other concern is the team, it seems rather small, experience is so-so and their lead PM just left.
Other than that, probably one of those rare opportunities where we can invest something that offers experience and diversification in the VC market. And if you factor in some tax reliefs for those that fail, this is seems like a nice opportunity.
Anyone here looking at Earthly? I invested in Ecologi, which seems miles ahead of Earthly, but the valuation, institutional backing and early traction seem very attractive. They are raising on Crowdcube, about a week left on the campaign. Anyone else in this?
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Well ecologi have general catalyst backing which I assume will provide them with top tier guidance at the board level. Perhaps this will give them an edge over the long term.
I missed out on them which Iām a bit gutted by 
Earthly seems very promising to me. They announced today that Google invested in them as part of their climate tech fund. Team seems very knowledgable and the carbon offsetting market is expected to grow from $300 million in 2021 to $50 billion in 2030 - a massive opportunity. And donāt forget that Eartly is earlier staged than ecologi with higher upside potential.
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What is the likely exit for Earthly? Is itās an IPO or Acquisition target and if so who?
Interesting to hear about the US equivalents - I shall take a look! Although I imagine itās probably not very tax efficient to invest from the UK.
I think itās great to have an experienced team do the due diligence and negotiate the investment terms, because the opportunity to do so on stand alone crowd investments is very limited (and time consuming!). Nevertheless, I do try to pick a few startups to invest in every year outside of funds like this.
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I think without EIS I would also struggle, you donāt get any relief on the downside and if thereās upside you pay significant carry fees on profits and then you also likely face a tax liability on top.
I agree with your assessment on the IRRs, itās simply still too early to tell. The IRR calcs are based on latest valuations, and not necessarily realised returns. While many of the companies have raised follow-on investments, I think itās still too early to estimate returns as there have not been enough exits yet to justify it - so time will tell.
Just read an article today (from Finance Feeds) which highlighted that global Equity Crowd Funding exploded last year. 2020 was approx $9BN, whereas 2021 was, wait for it, $100BN+ 
The new ECF legislation in the US is really helping to drive this where it is seriously opening up opportunities to everyone, not just accredited investors and with more companies having the ability to raise far higher amounts.
IMO this is going to mean more time required to sift through the rubbish, watching out and avoiding excessive valuations, focus on spreading investment into early stage start up funds, invest time in networking with fellow investors to share recommendations (like we do here) and also invest in paid subscriptions from companies like KingsCrowd who assess and rate start upsā¦
Letās see what 2022 brings but Iād predict more significant growth is on the way
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