When we first dreamed of Devine, we had a vision to welcome our friends and neighbors into the company and share some of the profits, even if they didn’t have lots of money to invest. Seasoned business people told us that there was no way to do that, but we never gave up hope. Then one day, we heard about Equity Crowd-funding.
Most everyone has heard of crowd-funding, where lots of people can give small amounts of money using the internet and social networks. Some successful companies have raised capital through crowd-funding. For example, Pop Sockets (the pop-out button you put on the back of your phone) started with a crowd-funding campaign on Kickstarter. In those traditional crowd-funding platforms, sometimes you get early access to the product or something else in exchange for your contributions.
But prior to 2016, federal law prohibited giving equity – a piece of ownership in the company – through crowd-funding. Before the laws were changed, only “qualified investors” (people who earned above a certain threshold) could invest in companies that were not publicly traded. Those wealthy investors were called angel investors. The new rules allow smaller investors to do what only “angel investors” used to be allowed to do. There are still some limits to how much you can invest, though, based on your annual income and net worth.
When we heard about equity crowdfunding, we did some investigation and found Fundanna. Fundanna is an online portal that allows start-up companies to do crowdfunding like Kickstarter does, but for equity investments specifically in our industry. We have worked with the folks at Fundanna for the past several months, gathering and preparing detailed financial information, including an independent financial audit, a business valuation, filming and producing the video, and preparing the financial disclosures. It took a lot of work, but our Fundanna fundraiser launched last month! If you go to Fundanna, you can find all that financial information there, plus the fun video we had made to show you a little about ourselves: https://fundanna.com/equity/offer-summary/NewGreen.
We are so excited about this new way that allows start-ups to raise capital, because it lets us fulfill our dream of welcoming people like you — everyday people who want to participate in a promising idea for a business — to join us on this adventure. If we can get 100 people to invest $1,000 each, we can reach our goal of opening our the shop, bringing a much-needed revenue source to our small community, and supporting our broader goals of social equity and environmental protection. If you have any questions about how much you can invest through Fundanna, please contact us and we can try to answer any questions.
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