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Seedrs launches private deal room to open up access to private deals to professional investors

Online investment platform, Seedrs, has launched Seedrs Private Deal Room, a new feature to improve professional investor access to angel, private equity, and venture capital opportunities. 

The launch of Private Deal Room is another step towards Seedrs’ mission to become the world’s largest private equity marketplace. 

The addition of Seedrs Private Deal Room means that the platform is now supporting European businesses at all stages, from pre-seed to pre-IPO, by encouraging a wider variety of deals – from angel investment, private rounds and secondary sales to public crowdfunding campaigns. Seedrs is allowing a new, more diverse generation of entrepreneurs to flourish as it expands access to growth capital, and helps them build more diverse and equitable cap tables. 

Seedrs Private Deal Room, which is open to angels, high net worth and sophisticated investors, is further democratising and diversifying angel investing. It brings the traditional offline angel investor process online and opens up a broad range of investment opportunities – from private share sales to LP opportunities in venture funds – to all eligible investors. 

Jeff Kelisky, CEO of Seedrs, says: “Access to the right investment opportunities is still as much based on who you know as it is what you know. With Private Deal Room, we’re opening up another layer of the hard-to-access investment world. We’re bringing sophisticated opportunities, which aren’t eligible for everyday retail investors, to professional investors. Therefore, now, in addition to our crowdfunding campaigns and secondary market investment opportunities, we’re continuing to make private business investing more accessible by also adding access to Private Markets.  

“The opportunities on Seedrs Private Deal Room will give professional investors access to deals that wouldn’t otherwise have been possible, like Impossible Food which will soon be available to investors. This is an exciting addition to our overall mission to open up investing in private companies to more businesses and more investors.“

Research by Seedrs found that over 90 per cent of high net worth and sophisticated investors are looking at primary deals, while 70 per cent prefer deals that are co-investments with institutions. Furthermore, Seedrs found that 60 per cent of investors prefer to be named on the cap table for greater rights and control. Seedrs Private Deal Room is meeting this market need by arranging  direct introductions for angels seeking investment opportunities, and entrepreneurs seeking to build early funding rounds, allowing for direct investment outside of the Seedrs nominee structure. Private Deal Room will also feature private offerings of sale allocations in later stage, pre-IPO companies. 

Seedrs Private Deal Room launches with a private offering of GBP1 million of shares in Impossible Food, the groundbreaking plant-based meat alternative, in a European exclusive secondary share sale. This will provide Seedrs’ network of professional and institutional investors to take a bite out of the alternative protein market, forecasted by BCG to grow to at least USD290 billion by 2035. It also represents the new type of private offerings that will now be open to sophisticated investors on the platform.

Investors are also set to become LPs in more VC funds through Seedrs Private Deal Room. This move expands on the success Seedrs had with the Passion Capital campaign earlier this year. Finally, investors will be able to participate in limited allocation pre-emption rounds facilitated by the Seedrs Nominee structure.

Martin Tippmann, a sophisticated Investor who invested GBP25 thousand into Pennyworth, says: “I think I’ve somewhat grown in my investor journey to a point where I want to invest as early as possible, also by having witnessed some early stage investments via Investment Funds on Seedrs, getting in earlier than the Seedrs crowd can already translate into the first 5-10x “missed”.

It’s certainly not for everybody investing pre-product, pre-MVP or just barely above concept-stage, but from time to time you see a pitch, and digesting the idea, being in a sector that you have a gut feeling for, being able to talk to the founders and finding out why they do it and how, it just clicks and you want to be part of that story.”

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