It’s safe to say, crowdinvesting is a hot topic. Among single entrepreneurs, among startups and as it seems – among incubators, too. Croatian ZIP recently launched a campaign on UK-based crowdinvesting platform Seedrs and quickly raised itstarget of 50.000 British pounds.
“Even though our goal was initially 50.000 pounds, we are currently in an ‘overfunding’ stage, meaning the campaign will be running either until we raise 75.000 pounds in total, or until the two months since it began are over,” Mihovil Barančić, co-founder of ZIP, told inventures.eu.
Around 120 investors have already participated in the campaign, the majority of whom from Croatia and the UK, according to ZIP.
For the team, this outcome is a recognition of their work in the past two years, and of the fact that ZIP has both local and international investors that support them, said Barančić.
“[This support] will further enable the best startups going through our program to fully commit to their projects and take them to market and/or to the next funding round stage,” he added.
ZIP’s upcoming activities
ZIP was founded in 2012 with the goal to help entrepreneurs from Southeast Europe build up successful companies. So far, selected teams have received free coworking space, access to ZIP’s mentorship network as well as exposure to media and investors. Now, with the Seedrs campaign almost wrapped up, ZIP will also start making financial investments “in the range of approximately 10.000 pounds for approximately ten percent share,” said Barančić.
“We will invest only in those [startups] that have successfully completed the first three months of our Startup Program and for which we deem they have a real chance to succeed,” he added.
With over 100 investors onboard, ZIP’s ownership structure will not change. The collected funds will be put into a newly created limited partnership in the UK, which will be investing in each of the selected startups, Barančić explained.
“Seedrs will hold investors’ limited partnership interests (which constitute their equity in the fund) as nominee the same way that it does for all other startups that raise money through its platform,” he said. This structure is analogous to the one that traditional venture capital and private equity funds use, and it provides flexibility […] when investing in companies from multiple jurisdictions and currencies.”
The planned start of investments in SEE startups is this coming autumn.
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