December 2021

Smallbrooks - December 2021 update

By Mathias Foged

Second investment round on Funderbeam and new employees

In 2019, we raised money through the equity crowdfunding platform Funderbeam. That went quite well and we ended up raising more than 350,000 euro, from more than 150 investors. We would like to start by saying thank you to all our investors, and thank you for your confidence in us. The money has given us the opportunity to further develop and market Smallbrooks, the software solution for crowdfunding platforms. 

Since our last investment round, we have signed new contracts for crowdfunding platforms, one with a large agricultural organisation, another with a green energy company and lastly, one with the second-largest municipality in Denmark. We are very excited to see these platforms up and running.

 

Furthermore, we have welcomed two new faces to Smallbrooks, Mathias Foged, our new digital marketing manager, and Rocio Triboli, our newest account manager. Their task is to market the software solution to the European market.

Due to the traction we have experienced with Smallbrooks, we have decided to once again open up for investing in the solution through the Funderbeam platform.

If you have never heard about Funderbeam or equity crowdfunding, you can head over to their site and read their excellent content on the topic here. 

The evolution of the Smallbrooks solution

Back in 2014, we founded the company Lendino, a loan-based crowdfunding platform in Denmark. So far, it’s going very well and today the platform is still showing strong performance. 

Meanwhile, the continuous development within the crowdfunding world, meant that several large organisations and companies started expressing an interest in building their own crowdfunding platform.

In today’s busy world, it can be difficult to engage members and customers, and enterprises are increasingly looking for new, innovative ways of creating interest and loyalty with their ‘crowd’. 

So having a branded, tailored crowdfunding platform can be a new way of digitising and expanding community building and customer engagement. The users can gather around projects and support the ideas and initiatives that they find meaningful.

The organisation acts as the facilitator and thereby creates an entirely new product for their users. Our customers, such as Coop Denmark, have experienced a significant level of customer engagement and satisfaction, as a consequence of making crowdfunding a part of their products and services.

However, building a crowdfunding platform is a highly specialised service. This is why we used our expertise that we gained from our own platform, to create Smallbrooks in 2017 as a general IT-solution that can be customised to the needs of any organisation or company. So far we have worked with several sectors such as unions, agriculture and retail, to build crowdfunding platforms for their users.

With our latest round of investments we are increasingly aiming to make Smallbrook the #1 solution for crowdfunding platforms in Europe. 

Where are we going and why?

The last couple of years, we have built significant momentum and we see no reason to slow down. We just received an investment of more than 500,000 euro from a Belgian investment fund and our team has been expanded. 

In our own country of Denmark, crowdfunding as a concept is still growing, but it’s nothing compared to the progress we have seen with our neighbors. 

Knowledge of crowdfunding in Denmark is rather limited when you compare it to countries such as Finland, the Netherlands or Latvia, to name a few. The higher level of familiarity also means that the potential gains from building a crowdfunding platform is significantly greater. 

At the same time, new regulations within the EU have made it a lot easier to operate and run crowdfunding platforms across European borders, which in turn makes it even more attractive for organisations of companies to provide crowdfunding as a service.

At the moment, we are also developing a more simple version of our crowdfunding platform software, aimed towards companies that would like to try out a simpler, more limited version of our solution and run a few test projects before building their own, custom platform. We are looking forward to announcing more about this soon. 

We are very excited about the future and are currently in talks with several organisations that have expressed an interest in crowdfunding. We truly believe that crowdfunding provides an exceptional opportunity to democratise the way finance works and we hope to see more and more sectors adopt the concept into their services. 

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Smallbrooks is co-funded by the European Union under the Programme for Employment and Social Innovation (EaSI)
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