Equity-based crowdfunding, where small investors join forces and buy an ownership stake in young companies, is becoming a big business, with nearly 1.4 billion dollars invested in the United States and Europe in 2015*. Most of these transactions originated in online platforms, and recent regulatory changes are helping to attract more investors to take part […]
Business Angels or Crowdfunding? How About a Crowd of Angels?
We are increasingly consulted whether it would be better for start-ups to assemble financial resources through crowdfunding (e.g. Kickstarter) or through angel investors, and how to sequence each funding mode (i.e. what should come first). However, an alternative route is to combine both modes by attracting financing through a ‘crowd’ of angels, or ‘equity based […]
Crowdfunding and the Financing of Entrepreneurial Ventures
Lending Club’s IPO preparations mark an important milestone for Peer to Peer (P2P) lending. Since its inception in 2007, Lending Club has facilitated billions of dollars in personal loans with about $2 billion of those loans originating in 2013 alone. In essence, P2P lending websites (Prosper and Zopa are other examples) have disintermediated the banking […]
Out of the Building and into the Web: Technology Entrepreneurship and Crowdfunding
The Case for Crowdfunding …