🗒️ Equity crowdfunding appears immune to market volatility, on track for its best year yet
Techcrunch: Equity crowdfunding — or community raises, as the fundraising platforms involved prefer to call it — has grown steadily over the last few years. Regulations governing the process continue to evolve in the market’s favor, and 2022’s venture funding pullback may be the final piece needed to quiet the fundraising strategy’s naysayers for good.
🗒️ Startup Founders Say Venture-Capital Investors Are Driving Harder Deals
Wall Street Journal: Startup founders say venture-capital investors are offering tougher terms as companies attempt to raise money amid economic uncertainty and a broad selloff in tech stocks.
Valuations are sharply lower than they would have been last year, according to entrepreneurs who gathered at the Collision tech conference that drew 35,000 attendees in Toronto last week.
“We’re raising a Series A right now,” said Dejan Mirkovic, chief executive and co-founder of Goose Insurance Services Inc., a Vancouver-based startup with an app that people use to find, get quotes for and buy insurance. In venture capital, “A” series funding follows initial angel or seed investments and can be followed by additional rounds of venture funding.
“The issue is that the market has a lot of capital to deploy, but everyone’s a little gun-shy,” Mr. Mirkovic said last week in Toronto. “A 30% haircut right now is what we’re seeing,” he said, referring to the decline in startup valuations from their peak.
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🗒️ Making money vs raising money: Funding your business without Venture Capital
London Loves Business: There seems to be a prevalent belief in the business community that to advance and expand your business, it is essential to have external investment. Raising money, whether through venture capital, seed funding, or angel investment, is taken by many founders to be the default route for growing their companies, but it is certainly not the only path to scaling your business.
Entering into an agreement with external investors is not something to be taken lightly, especially combined with the pressures of launching and growing a new start-up. While raising money through venture capital may seem like the obvious solution to cash-flow woes in the early stages of your launch, it can often raise problems further down the line.
So, what are the downsides of external financial backing, and what are the alternatives?
🗒️ Your money in the metaverse: How the future of investing and financial planning could be reshaped
Venturebeat: It’s a fresh new year, and 2022 is setting up to be even bigger and better for the progression of all things cryptocurrency. Last year we saw a boom in excitement around NFTs, GameFi, and the future of the metaverse. The Collins Dictionary declared NFT (nonfungible token) its word of the year, while Facebook rebranded and relaunched its umbrella company as “Meta,” which, while pushing the idea further into the mainstream, was met with a wave of annoyance from the industry. But one thing is certain: everyone, from gamers to corporations to diplomats, is rushing to be the first initiated into the foundry of this impending future landscape, the metaverse.
