Top Deal: Equity Crowdfunding Believers Should Take a Close Look at StartEngine

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Summary

At time of publication, June 14th, StartEngine had raised $4.87M of a $5M raise
What if you could invest in the New York Stock Exchange at the beginning of the 20th Century?

Sounds great, doesn’t it? Imagine walking through the doors of the NYSE situated at the intersection of Broad and Wall Street in lower Manhattan. Behind you sits the imposing J.P. Morgan Bank, perhaps Mr. Morgan himself is watching you through a haze of cigar smoke enter your new kingdom. Before entering, you glance over your right shoulder at the other structure within view of the door you are about to pass through: Federal Hall. In front of which stands a Statue of George Washington taking the Oath of Office as First President of the United States. You smile, thinking “I’m going to help lead a different kind of revolution.”

It’s painful to look back in hindsight at the thousands of companies throughout American corporate history that went on to make investors rich. We all wish we could go back in time and buy just a few shares of Microsoft or CME Group right from the start. StartEngine is the crowdfunding investor’s way to participate in the very market st. to shake up investing as we know it.

Just like the New York Stock Exchange (by institutionalizing what was once done by a handshake).

Viva la Revolution

StartEngine, a portal for equity crowdfunding investors to seamlessly buy shares in exciting early-stage companies, has already had a great deal of success by raising over $35 million from the public.

Owning a piece of any one of the players in 20th-century Wall Street, be it an investment bank like Goldman Sachs or a trading institution like the New York Stock Exchange would have tied your fortunes to an ever-expanding pie — just like equity crowdfunding today.

Thanks to the JOBS Act of 2012, traditional barriers to raising capital from the American public have been torn down. No longer does a company need to go to an investment bank to sell shares then to be traded on an exchange for precious operating capital.

By allowing companies to raise any amount of capital from a practically unlimited number of small investors the monopoly long-held by Wall Street has been torn down.

StartEngine helps early-stage companies raise capital by operating a platform that enables two classes of investors to buy into startups: Regulation Crowdfunding and Regulation A+. Both allow companies to offer equity, debt, revenue, and even royalties through crowdfunding. StartEngine makes money in several ways. StartEngine charges 6% of total capital raised for Small OPOs (this applies only to Regulation Crowdfunding. This amount is charged to the company raising capital and may vary. For larger offerings, the portal charges $50 per unique investor plus warrants on the company in question OR $20,000 per month plus warrants in the case of large OPO’s (Online Public Offerings).

According to Statista, the equity crowdfunding market will help companies raise $1 Trillion this year — a figure that is expected to grow to approximately $1.5 Trillion by 2022.

The crowdfunding revolution has already begun.

As investors, we are all trying to buy shares of companies that stand a solid chance of paying back our initial capital and then some (hopefully multiples more).

Very few markets have the potential to grow like equity crowdfunding — the benefits to businesses and average investors are just too numerous.

StartEngine is essentially a leading “gatekeeper” to this booming market, And as the old saying goes, a “rising tide lifts all boats.”

Leading the way to the crowdfunding revolution

Right now, we have a fast-growing private capital market that has the blessing of the Federal Government via the Jobs ACT of 2012. In StartEngine, we have an equity crowdfunding portal currently valued at $65 million by the same investors it has helped invest some $35 million in scores of other private businesses.

If this isn’t a recipe for success, we don’t know what is.

StartEngine has been an industry leader in the equity crowdfunding space having raised 21% of the $100M that has been raised via Regulation Crowdfunding (RegCF). By 2022, it is estimated that RegCF alone will fund startups with over $1B in the capital every year. By that logic, StartEngine will be funding about $200M a year on its platform just through RegCF within five years.

The above figures do not include RegA+ deals, regulated ICOs or secondary market transactions that StartEngine also supports. StartEngine is on pace to be funding somewhere in the neighborhood of at least $500M to $1B a year by 2022.

With its core business model focused on charging a 6% transaction fee, StartEngine will be on pace to be pulling in $30 to $60M a year in revenue in the very near future. From a higher level, it’s clear that something very big is happening over at StartEngine HQ, and the “fuel” for this “engine” is a dynamic and increasingly in-demand crowdfunding market.

All-in-all, StartEngine, a platform for the very form of investing KingsCrowd espouses, checks a lot of basic “investment” boxes: market leadership, an enviable growth-record, and a solid path to bountiful future profits.

A top-notch executive team even leads the company. Under the leadership of Co-founder and CEO Howard Marks who was previously the CEO of Acclaim Games (an online game publisher that has since sold to Disney) and Chairman of Activision Studios from 1991 until 1997.

In KingsCrowd’s view, with this team and this market, it’s hard not to imagine things not turning out well for investors.

Collecting tolls

StartEngine’s 22% all-time market share of Equity Crowdfunding raises alone says it all.

We here at KingsCrowd liken the situation to the classic Warren Buffett-ism of owning a toll-collector. Owning an increasingly-busy bridge is a great way to make money, and StartEngine is in the midst of building a very important bridge.

We can’t go back in time and buy the “toll collectors” of the past (think Google), but we can use our knowledge of what is happening before our eyes today to make smart investments.

True, another entrant could take away StartEngine’s market leadership. Or one of the capital-raising toll collectors of the past (think Goldman Sachs) could make a big splash in the space. But we think this is unlikely for the time being, as the fees StartEngine stands to make aren’t big enough attract any investment bank whose balance sheet is in the hundreds of billions.

That is, at least until it’s too late and StartEngine’s leadership position for equity crowdfunding is assured. For those interested in placing their chips on a leading horse in the equity-crowdfunding space StartEngine seems like a great fit.