Seedrs’ CEO, Jeff Kelisky
Seedrs
Seedrs was first launched in 2012, and its since helped startups raise a total of £2.3 billion with 1,870 deals funded so far.
From climate tech to data analytics, consumer products, and food and beverage, there are over 17 different sectors represented on Seedrs; typically, there hasn’t been any one sector that represents more than about 12% of the total. However, that may be due to change: the fastest growing sector on Seedrs is climate tech – energy, and sustainability as a category.
2022 was a significant year for clean tech investment growth on the platform with clean energy growth outperforming all other sectors with 40% more investors moving into the space in 2022 than the year before.
“That news spreads,” says Seedr’s CEO Jeff Kelisky, “each of those investors becomes a storyteller to their network so that will only accelerate.”
Jeff believes in 2023, the climate tech investment growth trend will continue, particularly in all forms of electric vehicles including cars, bikes and boats, as well as in renewable energy.
“Last year, we saw over 141,000 individual investments in 324 campaigns and just over half a billion pounds raised. The 324 campaigns are growth – we served more entrepreneurs last year than we did the year before.
“One of the biggest challenges was less our direct retail audience, it was more that founders were finding that institutions were more timorous – their anchor rounds are a little bit smaller.
“This is partly down to evaluation declines where they don’t want to give away too much equity. And so that reduction in the institutional side or anchoring side was where we saw a difference; it wasn’t the retail participation, says Kelisky.”
Despite the turbulent macroeconomic environment, Seedrs hasn’t seen a drop in retail investment interest.
Instead, the fundamentals of fundraising still ring true. Success on the platform, says Kelisky, comes down to a brand’s ability to build momentum and grab attention with story-telling in a way that resonates with the target audience.
For each wave of investor segment, getting attention and building momentum should be carefully managed.
“It’s really about honing your story for different audiences. And again, that sounds perhaps an obvious step that all founders have to do anyway. But you’re doing it in the context of a broad crowd and therefore it needs to be consumable at scale.”
Increasingly, millennials and Gen Z investors are making investment decisions which connect to who they are, their values, the things they’re passionate about. “But whether you’re B2B or B2C,” says Kelisky, “you need to tell your story well.”
Crowdfundraising, it appears, is no exception to the wider cleantech investment growth trend that has seen high-potential climate tech startups come out on top despite the turbulent macroeconomic environment.
PitchBook forecasts the climate tech sector will become a $1.4 trillion market within the next five years – this is a compound annual growth rate for climate tech of 8.8% overall. And it’s renewables that have been coming out as the front runners of this growth trend following the turbulence, price hikes, and supply chain disruption that ensued after Russia attacked Ukraine.
