Last night PledgeMe hosted Startup Garage at our Wellington office. Startup Garage is a regular meetup where people talk about startups, tech and the entrepreneurial lifestyle. This time the group took a look at two kinds of investment Angel and equity crowdfunding.
Photo Cred: @BekaWhale // BizDojo
David Allison, Manager of Wellington’s Angel Investment Club AngelHQ, spoke about the idea of angel investing. Turns out it’s an age old idea — people stumping up cash and resources to help a business start up — just that the term “angel” is a newish one that came out of the USA a while back.
AngelHQ operates as a club of individuals all of who have experience and capital and are looking to get something out of the investment. They’ve been around for a few years in Wellington and have invested about $8 million into 34 companies which cover a range of industries.
You can find out more about the club here.
Then Anna talked about PledgeMe’s new equity crowdfunding option, explaining that she set off on the PledgeMe journey wanting to create a platform that allowed to fund things differently.
Crowdfunding is a young place, not just in terms of the platforms only being a few years old, but in terms of the people who are using it. We’ve had a group of 9-year-olds use PledgeMe. It’s also a growing market. There are now over 1000 crowdfunding platforms worldwide with a steady amount of money being raised through them.
Anna talked about the very new idea of equity crowdfunding, companies going out to their crowds and bringing them in to make them not only shareholders, but champions of their business. The basics of why and how you could run an equity crowdfunding campaign. More info on that for those who missed the talk here.
There was a lot of interest from the crowd about how equity crowdfunding works with questions about the ins and outs flying thick and fast. Which is great because one of PledgeMe’s goals over the next while is to better educate entrepreneurs and business about how it works so they can take advantage of our platform to harness their crowds.
If you’re keen to come along to more Startup Garage events check out their Meetup page here and for other events around startups, business, and tech check out Built In Wellington’s events calendar.
