Looking to understand where our data comes from and how we populate the reports?
Our Dashboards represent data visualization on a database of investment offerings across equity funding platforms. We started in 2014 by manually importing listings one by one, from the public listings on each platform we covered.
We have since automated our process. Now we leverage public SEC filings aggregating the investment filings having built a dashboard for insights and analysis.
Geography
Additionally, we’re focused on opportunities in the United States. There is a large and growing equity crowdfunding market globally. The UK was ahead of the US with regulation and adoption. This has expanded across Europe, Asia, and Latin America. We wrote an article to address some of our observations of the global market vs the US.
Defining the Market
Equity Investing Portals - If you’re starting a business and need money upfront the traditional way to do this was to go to a bank, venture capital firms, or use your own money. Websites and mobile apps built to facilitate the transactions have been termed funding portals, equity crowdfunding sites, or investing platforms. There are two major categories of investing structures: accredited and non-accredited.
Regulated Non Accredited Equity Crowdfunding
Most of the insights we provide today falls in this category. These are fund raising campaigns that launch under regulations like Reg D 506 Title III of the Jobs Act (aka Reg CF). Historically only accredited investors, or wealthy people defined by the SEC were able to invest in businesses offering shares at an early stage, outside of friends and family. This limited opportunities for those who were not wealthy enough to qualify.
The US SEC has added Equity Funding Portal filings to the EDGAR online filing database. The SEC site now has section built for equity funding portals and different Regulation funding offerings like D and A+.
To obtain this data, we manually reviewed info from public webpages on the equity crowdfunding platforms. Then we recorded each listing in our own private database and ran regular updates.
The US SEC EDGAR database provides a centralized resource for public filing information. It provides transparency but the data is not quality controlled or organized, and no public government-funded reporting system currently exists. We built a database and identified others that provide information on how much money is moving through today’s equity portals.
Accredited Investor Portals
Most Accredited portals do not provide public listings as they once did, back in 2014-2015 so gathering this data has become very challenging.
We built a detailed report of data back in 2015 . Around the time we released the report the accredited investor platforms began placing the equity listings behind a login, no longer making them public behind a login. The login requires accredited investor verification.
Asset Type
We're focused on equity crowdfunding, where we have not listed portals focused on debt (loans), real estate, and reward-based crowdfunding (like Kickstarter). Put simply, we're looking for the opportunities available to anyone to buy shares of a company, just like buying stock on an established exchange. We built a dashboard to showcase our live data.
Others
Different vendors, portals, analysts, and academics provide excellent insights and reports to compare our findings. Organizations such as Crowditz, StartEngine Index and academic efforts such as the University of Cambridge’s Center for Alternate Finance were integral in performing this analysis.