Estonia is one of the three Baltic countries, together with Latvia and Lithuania. Estonia is well known for having introduced a government system based on internal e-Residency: e-voting, e-taxing. Recently Estonia established e-Residency for all nationalities: a digital identity with the possibility of running a company online from anywhere in the world. So one would expect that online funding would be booming. But not in the beginning. Henri Laupmaa, the founder of Hooandja (www.hooandja.ee), first tested his idea for a crowdfunding platform on his friends 5 years ago, and most of them thought that Estonians were too reserved to put their backing of a project online. There was no word for crowdfunding yet in the Estonian language. He started with Hooandja in 2012 anyway, as a donation/reward based crowdfunding site for the creative sector. In 2015 he founded a second crowdfunding platform, now for equity crowdfunding: Fundwise (www.fundwise.me), because some of the companies which first raised money on Hooandja now needed more investment funding
Platform partnerships
The website TousNosProjets.fr is a platform that aggregates projects of French crowdfunding platforms. It was initiated by the French public investment bank BPI France. The goal of the platform is to support the emergence of crowdfunding in France by giving visibility to the crowdfunding industry and its operating platforms.
When the platform was set up in 2014 it hosted 13 French platforms, including donation and reward-based platforms, lending-based platforms and investment-based platforms. In September 2016, TousNosProjets.fr had 38 French crowdfunding platforms on its website, which hosted a total number of 956 projects.
Seedrs is an equity crowdfunding platform with offices in The Netherlands, Germany, America, Portugal and a head office in London. Since its foundation in 2012 it has grown to be one of the leading equity crowdfunding platforms of its kind, with the most active investors in private companies in the UK. Seedrs also offers the entrepreneur a single point of contact with all investors.
The platform has successfully completed over 450 funding rounds with an average of 189 investors per project. Seedrs does not specifically focus on any business sectors, the site only lists projects that fit in with its ethics and which are likely to reach their funding targets.
Voordekunst is the biggest Dutch crowdfunding platform dedicated to arts and culture. In the past six years it raised some €12,9 million donated to 2.219 projects through 128.477 donations (numbers retrieved on 19-12-2016).
Voordekunst takes a lot of effort to guide applicants for crowdfunding projects towards a successful campaign. This has resulted in a 80% success percentage of the campaigns on their platform, which is very high compared to most crowdfunding platforms. Their knowledge on setting up campaigns has become a source of income in the form of selling counselling, workshops and masterclasses.
These features have made them attractive for partnerships. At the moment they show 18 partners on their website. Most of them are public funds and regional governments, others are private funds and there are also some companies involved.
MyMicroInvest is a Brussels based crowdfunding platform that supports and funds entrepreneurs by partnering up with professional investors. Even though MyMicroInvest does not focus uniquely on CCS projects, they have funded projects in the field, for example “YouScribe” (a kind of Netflix of books). All projects they fund are selected on the basis of their sustainability, profitability and positive outcome for society. Partnerships with professional investors that they form and use, mean that about 60% of the raised funds come from professional investors and 40% from crowd investors (backers).
At the end of 2011, the Hamburg public agency for creative stakeholders and enterprises - Hamburg Kreativ Gesellschaft (HKG) - and the crowdfunding platform StartNext co-created Nordstarter. The platform was created with the aim of opening up additional financing for Cultural and Creative actors in Hamburg. The establishment of Nordstarter has institutionalized crowdfunding as part of the financing ecosystem of cultural and creative actors in Hamburg.
