New crowdfunding platform launched

Angels’ Den founder Bill Morrow has launched a new crowdfunding platform – Angels’ Den Crowdfunding – what he claims to be the world’s first integrated angel and crowdfunding platform.

Unlike most platforms, which focus on one crowdfunding model, this new venture will promote all three – crowdinvesting, crowdlending and real crowdfunding.

According to Bill, what makes this platform unique is the 6,000 strong angel community already actively funding businesses in the Den, combined with a new investment model:

“At Angels Den we’ve been successfully matching entrepreneurs and angel investors for six years. We’ve invested £16 million in that time.

“We’re now enabling entrepreneurs to pitch their business projects online with a choice of options for angels and ordinary individuals to back them.

“Angels can invest money for a share of the business, lenders can offer a fixed term loan and donors can simply make it happen, no strings attached, in return for a reward.”

The site goes live with a handful of projects already crowdfunding, one of which is a campaign being run by one of the original entrepreneurs from Dragons Den, Rachel Elnaugh.

Elnaugh, formerly of Red Letter Days, is launching SourceTV – a video based marketing portal designed to enable Thought Leaders and Transformational Teachers to get their messages of empowerment and online products to a global audience.

Her project has already reached 31 percent of her £100,000 target with 16 days to go.

Morrow is one of the speakers at the upcoming national crowdfunding conference, Deep Impact 2: Capitalism Rebooted. He’ll be talking about his crowdfunding journey since February of this year, when he told the first conference – Deep Impact – that crowdfunding wouldn’t work for the angel community.

“One of the problems I had with crowdfunding was how to be responsible to both sides of the deal, the investors and the entrepreneurs,” explained Morrow.  “I didn’t like the nomination structure on crowdfunding deals where the investor doesn’t have a say in the business after putting money in.

“We’ve spent eight months developing a model that meshes traditional investing with crowdfunding, where real people have real shares in a business and where they can have a voice whether they put in £20 or £20,000.