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Revvies Energy Strips Limited just closed Australia’s first completed equity crowdfunding campaign.
The company behind a fast dissolving mouth strip that delivers 40mg of caffeine raised nearly $300,000 from 239 investors via equity crowdfunding platform OnMarket.
Xinja, a digital bank startup, was the first to launch, via Equitise, an equity crowdfunding offer. Its campaign is expected to close in the next few days.
Seven companies were issued Australian Financial Services authorisations to provide crowd-sourced funding. Equity crowdfunding enables Australian retail investors to invest as little as $50 or as much as $10,000 in a business.
New legislation enabled by the Crowd-sourced Funding Act 2017, allows companies with less than $25 million in gross assets to raise up to $5 million a year.
Retail investors are able to invest up to $10,000 per company a year.
“Equity crowdfunding brings entrepreneurs and consumer investors together for the first time, and that is what we have been able to achieve with Revvies,” says OnMarket founder Ben Bucknell.
“This is the first equity crowdfunding deal to be completed in Australia.
“We anticipate that there will be significant interest in this space going forward, from both companies looking for capital and investors looking for access to innovative, growing companies, just like Revvies.”
Revvies supplies six national sports teams, 20 professional clubs, and Olympic athletes from Australia, New Zealand and the UK.
John Nolan-Neylan, Revvies co-founder, says the beauty of accessing the crowd is that new investors will now become endorsers and influencers.
“We found that equity crowdfunding to be a great way to build brand awareness for Revvies, and an exciting new alternative to the more traditional ways small companies like us would normally raise capital,” he says.
The Revvies equity crowdfunding offer opened on February 15 and closed on March 23. The minimum investment size into the Revvies offer was $250.
