Estonia-based Funderbeam is a unique hybrid of a crowdsourcing site and a stock exchange. It offers companies the possibility of raising capital, lets the investors browse an extensive database in search for the most promising startups, and provides a platform for investment trading – all supported by a third-party-free blockchain technology.
“We offer liquidity to investments by having a secondary market. On top, we offer free data intelligence. This combination of Funding, Trading and Data is completely unique,” says Mads Dalsgaard, Funderbeam CMO, when asked about the key feature of the platform.
Funderbeam was founded in 2013 by Kaidi Ruusalepp, who gained experience at the Estonian Central Securities Depository and as an executive at NASDAQ Tallinn stock exchange. The cofounder, Urmas Peiker, is now responsible for business development. Before Funderbeam, he worked at EBRD, Morgan Stanley, and finally as the Head of Compliance at LHV Bank.
The platform originally started as an educational project – a game about trading stocks designed for teenagers. Stocks were replaced with companies as a more intuitive solution. Funderbeam team realized that this trading platform was the missing component in the world of startup investing.
Everyone can become an investor at Funderbeam, whether as an individual or as a company. Investors acquire tokens representing real world assets when they join funding rounds for promising startups. These tokens can be traded with others on the blockchain at any time, so investors are never forced to wait for the startup to exit. Moreover, trading is completely charge-free for now. When a company makes a successful exit (either goes public or gets sold), all token holders receive a payout based on the current value of the startup.
Additionally, Funderbeam helps their users make smart and conscious decisions, featuring over 180k startups and investors in a detailed database. Users can not only find descriptions of each company, but also analyze the data regarding previous funding rounds and the competitive landscape.
Funderbeam is a pioneer in blockchain – it’s the first securities trading platform that uses this technology. The company discarded intermediate parties between investors and companies, creating a safe, transparent environment with a built-in trust system.
Since 2013, Funderbeam has completed seven funding rounds, with $4.75m total disclosed funding. Investors include Draper Associates, Thomson Reuters, and IQ Capital, but also Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn, and David Braben, the CEO and Founder of Frontier Developments.
The access to Funderbeam is free except for a 1% fee on any profit made on investments. For now, the platform is available to users from all over the world except the United States.
Funderbeam will appear at <A HREF=”http://impactcee.com”>ImpactCEE</A> in Wroclaw in December.
