Freetrade is back on Crowdcube: 25th April

[Update: Read the responses from our CEO Adam at our Ask Me Anything crowdfunding session last Friday]

We’re crowdfunding again!

A year since our record-breaking funding round, we’re coming back to Crowdcube on 25th April at 12 PM to raise again and you’re all invited!

We couldn’t be more excited.

Everyone on the app or who signs up to our mailing list will get updates.

As always, the community will be the place for the latest information and details. Check out this FAQ to know everything.

You can also come to Freetrade HQ on Tuesday 23rd April at 7pm to get the scoop on our upcoming crowdfunding round, meet the team & hear our post-fundraising plans.

Crowdfunding is the beating heart of Freetrade

In 2016, we were a literal handful of people with a few laptops and a crazy dream to dramatically improve the world of investing.

143 crowdfunding investors put faith in that dream and they were the spark for us to build a community of tens of thousands. In our subsequent round in 2017, thousands more of you joined us as Freetrade shareholders.

With your backing, we became a directly regulated financial institution and the newest member of the London Stock Exchange. We developed our backend, finalised the initial version of the app and executed the first trades on Freetrade.

Then in our latest round in 2018, we raised £3 million in just a day, the vast majority in private mode with only our own community able to access the round.

We hit the first £1,000,000 in only 12 minutes.

After that round, we launched Freetrade on both iOS and Android to over 20,000 customers so they can invest with no fees for the first time.

And we built a 40+ strong team, drawn from companies like Google, Snap Inc, Uber, Amazon, Deliveroo, and Skyscanner.

Why are we raising now?

Freetrade is now fully live with no waitlist. Our users have said that it’s the easiest, most customer-friendly way to invest in the UK. In February, we won ‘best share trading platform’ at the British Banking Awards in our first 4 months of service.

But our ambition runs deeper: we want to be the home screen app for investing.

Here’s how this round will support that.

The product’s out, time to scale

We will grow our engineering team and enhance our platform.

This will allow us to speed up important features like US fractional shares, a stock universe in the thousands and new account types. It’ll support our upcoming analytics, which will give our customers unique ways to understand their portfolios and improve their performance all from the app.

If you’ve looked at our roadmap recently, you’ll also have noticed one prominent item is our own investment platform. This is a unique technological and operational project. It will bring a huge amount of the intricate, decentralised processes and data streams of stock market investing into one modern, in-house platform.

As well as aiding many of the features above, this will dramatically drive down our costs and give us way more adaptability and freedom as a business.

We want it in place as quickly as possible. To ship it faster, we’re going to greatly expand our engineering team.

Customer growth

We are also raising new capital to scale our customer acquisition to a new level. To date, it’s been driven by word of mouth, and we’ve grown 12% on a compound weekly basis since late last year. It’s high — but it’s also time to supercharge that by expanding our growth channels. One of the first channels we will invest in is incentivised referrals.

European expansion

A lot of Freetrade supporters, including many of our investors, are European. There are still few good options for millions of first-time investors across the continent. It’s time for us to fill that gap and meet that demand.

After this round, we aim to launch our first European markets at the end of this year.

What are the details?

These are the details so far:

• The round starts 12 PM sharp on Thursday 25th April 2019
• We’re aiming to raise £1,000,000, with the ability to overfund
• As usual, we’ll reserve part of the round for community members

Get ready

Everything we’ve achieved so far was made possible by our investors. We can’t wait to re-open the doors for our existing investors and welcome new ones to join the Freetrade community, too.

25th April – countdown started! ⌚️👀

Capital at risk. Investments of this nature carry risk as well as potential rewards.
Click here to read the full Crowdcube Risk Warning.

We’re on a mission to bring fee-free investing to Europe and beyond. 🔥

‍