Seedrs wants to target sport

Crowdfunding platform Seedrs has announced that an unnamed Championship football club will soon fundraise on the platform. The company wants to target more sport teams and expects that it will add more of these campaigns in 2024.

Seedrs is an equity crowdfunding platform that was originally based in the United Kingdom. In 2021, it was acquired by Republic, a startup investing platform from the United States for more than 100 million euros.

Cuts because of restructuring

As a result, businesses can now raise funds in the UK, Europe and US at the same time on the Seedrs platform. Earlier this year, the company announced that it was laying off 15 percent of its European workforce. According to John Lake, managing director of Seedrs Europe, the cut was caused by the integration of the two businesses and by the global economic challenges.

‘We did have to do a restructure of parts of the global business.’

“Effectively with those two things coming together, we did have to do a restructure of parts of the global business and that did include making some difficult decisions in terms of reducing the total number of employees globally on a role by role basis”, said Lake.

New features and targets

As part of the restructure, the platform is soon launching Republic features, including sharedrops (which means gifting equity) and tokenized assets. Additionally, the platform will target sport fundraising campaigns.

Lake said that a campaign for an unnamed Championship football club will soon be launched. The Championship is England’s second tier football league. He also said that it would not be surprising if clubs from other leagues will use the platform in the future. This would make British sports club similar to the Bundesliga in Germany, where fans own majority stakes of clubs.

‘Allowing retail investors into rounds is effectively fan engagement.’

“Sport is a really interesting sector that we will be targeting. I am a big believer that what we do, allowing retail investors into rounds, and that is effectively fan engagement whether you are Revolut or AFC Wimbledon.”