We raised £1m in 77 seconds!
On 25th April, our latest crowdfunding round went live. Of all our crowdfunding rounds, this one was the most intense and the most astonishing.
We hit our £1m target in a record-breaking 77 seconds of the round being available and closed the round with £2m, having doubled our target in just a few minutes.
However, there was also a bit of disruption along the way!
The craziness started as soon as we brought the Crowdcube page up on the office widescreen. An error message popped up almost instantly, and we quickly started receiving messages from others who were seeing the same thing.
The sheer volume of traffic on Crowdcube was crashing the site on a completely different scale to last year.
It’s a pretty strange feeling to be overwhelmed with so much interest. In the day-to-day of the Freetrade office, it’s easy to forget quite how many people are cheering us on. Days like this remind us. 🙏
On the one hand it’s incredibly rewarding, but we were also anxious that our customers and community weren’t getting a smooth, stress-free experience.
A few members of our community even compared it to trying for Glastonbury tickets.
Due to “unprecedented levels of demand” and the disruption that caused, Crowdcube soon made the call to remove our pitch from their website.
Having already doubled our target, we then chose to close the pitch with £2m from 1,400 investors (all of which should be eligible for EIS tax relief).
We also decided that we’d return in June to give our community another chance to invest.
You can get the deep detail on this from our CEO Adam here.
Due to the later date, this additional June round unlocks an extra £2m boost to our crowdfunding cap and another potential £3m of EIS tax relief for our investors.
We also listened to your excellent feedback about how we can make the next round smoother.
We’ll structure the round more to cope with the demand we’ve seen and give our early investors more time to invest.
We thought this would be the fairest way and give our community and Crowdcube more time for what we hope will be another big, much more seamless round.
We want to say a huge thank you again to everyone who invested in this last round. We’re honoured and humbled by how much you all believe in Freetrade, and we can’t wait to deliver the features, products and expansion for which we raised.
We also want to say sorry to anyone who was disappointed on the day. We’ll be back soon with more room for everyone. ❤️
We’ll share the details/process of our next crowdfunding soon! Until then, keep your eyes peeled on the community. 🙏
We’re on a mission to bring fee-free investing to Europe and beyond. 🔥
