Equity crowdfund to grow your company.
Equity crowdfunding helps Kiwis fund the companies they care about.
Is your company ready to grow? 🌏
👏🏼 Do you have a strong, supportive crowd of people?
Do you have a clear plan about what you’ll do with additional funds? 🤔
🤝 In equity crowdfunding a company exchanges shares for investment.
Equity crowdfunding is different from project crowdfunding, which is where you invite your crowd to pledge to your campaign, in exchange for rewards. To learn more about project crowdfunding click here 🧐
🥳 In equity crowdfunding, your crowd become shareholders and ambassadors for your company
Companies can raise up to $2 million over a 12-month period through a licensed platform (like ours) 💲
💰 The Financial Markets Conduct Act 2014 regulates this new type of capital raising
To read up on the finer details of equity crowdfunding with PledgeMe click here 📕
“We used Pledgeme and they were perfect.”
Brianne West started Sorbet (which later became Ethique) in 2012 with the vision of creating the most sustainable cosmetics company in the world.
From her kitchen in Christchurch, she created solid shampoos, conditioners, cleansers, and other cosmetic products through cruelty-free means, ethically sourced ingredients and compostable packaging.
She equity crowdfunded twice with PledgeMe, raising $700k from 410 shareholders.
“We want our crowd of customers owning a piece of us. To keep us to our values (and) to come along for our journey”
— Brianne West, Ethique
A new skool capital raising tool
Traditionally, capital came from bank loans, angel investment, help from friends and family, or by dipping into your own savings. Equity crowdfunding is a new capital raising tool that’s more engaging and transparent. It can help Kiwis who have a great business plan, some traction, and excellent people, but can’t start up or grow due to a lack of finance. If you’ve got a crowd and a solid plan to take your business to the next level then equity crowdfunding might be for you.
“The PledgeMe team were great to work with, supporting us kindly and calmly at every stage - 10/10 would recommend!”
New Zealand’s leading plant-based cheese producer Angel Food ran their third successful equity campaign with us, enabling them to expand into Australia🦘 See their equity campaign here.
How about a kōrero?
Sometimes the best thing to do is have a chat about it. Our friendly team would love to hear from you and walk you through the process of how equity crowdfunding could work for your company.
“Crowd funding allowed us to get the support we needed, and bring our crowd in on the journey with us.”
Hunt and Gather are a Raglan based honey company who wanted to grow their family business. They started with a project crowdfunding campaign and went on to do an equity campaign with PledgeMe, raising $365,690 in total.
"We’ve got 170-odd shareholders who are now our brand ambassadors.”
Three Sisters Brewery raised $520,000 from their crowd of 174 investors. This enabled them to more than triple their production capacity. Check out their equity crowdfunding campaign here.
So, how does equity crowdfunding work?
1. The first thing you do before getting started is to make contact with the real people at PledgeMe (1-2 days).
2. After chatting with us you then register for CrowdfundingU which puts you on the path to launching your campaign as well as allows us to provide help and feedback on your video, pitch, business plan, financial forecasts and other documentation — (10-12 weeks). Please note: If you are planning to apply for Management Capability Funding, this may take an additional 1-2 weeks.
3. Then you get ready to go out to your crowd and ask them to pledge investment (varies depending on campaign length)/
4. When you make your goal, all the verified people who pledged become shareholders in your company and you receive their investment dollars. It’s important to remember you have an ongoing responsibility to your shareholders under the Companies Act.
Creating kinder, fairer dairy.
Happy Cow founder Glen Herud raised over $1 million over three equity crowdfunding campaigns to grow his company. Happy Cow helps good dairy farmers of the world to provide fresh local milk to customers who want to support more caring, kinder and greener dairy practices.
Great, and how would PledgeMe help me equity crowdfund?
PledgeMe is here to help.
We’re pretty good at it too, PledgeMe has already helped tens of companies and hundreds of projects raise millions of dollars in New Zealand.
Other than the basics of operating the platform and hosting campaigns, through CrowdfundingU, we support you planning, provide guidance on putting your showcase documents together, creating effective pitches, videos, and (almost) anything else you need to make your campaign awesome.
There are some serious things that we will need to do, like background checks and wrapping our heads around your business plan and financials to make sure you’re not being inadvertently misleading. We cannot provide you with financial advice, but we can offer feedback on all the other things that will make your campaign a success.
“We haven’t sold out. We’ve still got control of our company.”
Peoples Coffee equity crowdfunded to share their ethical coffee love with the rest of Aoteroa. They raised $284,640 from a crowd of 220 people in early 2023. Founder Matt Lamason says “I’m just really excited. What does it mean to have 220 investors? I think it’s a really powerful base.”
Check out Peoples Coffee’s equity crowdfunding campaign here.