Portal Vetting
Curious what additional vetting Republic does over Wefunder or Start Engine?
- 3 Replies
Sorry I completely missed this post!
We cover some of the differences in detail in various funding portal articles and these reviews here:
http://crowdwise.org/courses/funding-portal-reviews/
It’s important to understand that there is a base-level of due diligence that all funding portals must do according to Regulation Crowdfunding (bad actor checks, etc.).
At a high level and without getting into the proprietary details that each of them do:
- Wefunder lets anyone raise, as long as they can show that they meet a minimum level of interest from their existing audience by a getting certain amount of commitments prior to launching. They do this often by using Testing the Waters before officially filing a Form C and launching their Reg CF campaign
- StartEngine has more of an opaque process where founders must apply and then are reviewed by the StartEngine team and assessed for being a good fit for the platform
- Republic publicly says that they do more due diligence on their deals. They have a detailed page talking about how they select deals here: https://republic.com/learn/investors/how-we-select-startups
SeedInvest is another platform that does more deal curation (e.g. looking for good potential investment opportunities, not just any company looking to raise capital.)
By the way, just because Republic and SeedInvest might have more of a due diligence process, it doesn’t mean that you won’t find some fantastic investment opportunities on Wefunder. Quite the contrary – you just need to know that you may have to do a little more digging and that there are more lifestyle businesses perhaps raising community rounds, which can still be fun to invest in, but might not have the same potential returns and goals as high-growth startups.
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This reply was modified 1 year, 11 months ago by Brian.
Thanks and no problem. I am actually a founder so was looking for insight when I posted this in choosing a portal.
Great!
You also might have already seen this, and while the stats are a bit dated (from 2020), the overall takeaways in terms of due diligence, check size, etc. are still true today:
http://crowdwise.org/funding-portals/top-10-equity-crowdfunding-sites-2020/
You can get the latest fundraising stats from KingsCrowd, either researching the historical deal database (valuations, amount raised, industry, much more) or the overall industry trends:
https://kingscrowd.com/companies/search/
https://kingscrowd.com/markets/
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