Lately, the never-ending fountain of joy in our head office and among Smartlands ambassadors around the world has been blasting especially hard: Smartlands is in the final stages of preparing an equity round on Seedrs, and you should expect the launch shortly. We have successfully passed due diligence and have been greenlit by Seedrs to launch the campaign.

We are especially proud of this milestone because the finishing touches on our campaign are applied while the global pandemic continues to ravage the planet. But, despite the uneasy times we are confident that the situation will normalise very soon and people will get well. What is clear at this point is that the world most likely will not be the same anymore so we must now calmly look to the future and try to discern the paths for development in 2020 and the coming years. We will unveil our vision for the future in more detail in the coming days, in the meantime we are at the final stage of preparing the launch of our fundraising campaign on Seedrs.

In the unlikely case of your not knowing what Seedrs is, we thought we’d do a short run-down of its latest achievements so our outlook would become as clear as can be to our future investors, friends, associates, and the rest of the members of the Smartlands community.

To put it simply, Seedrs is a perfect instrument for early- and mid-round funding of fintech companies – big and small, startups and mature businesses. In fact, you may remember that Revolut – easily, the grandest success story in fintech – got a major boost on Seedrs during its overwhelmingly successful second round of financing in July 2017 because Seedrs makes it a breeze putting trust in an enterprise you believe will reach new heights with your help: you create an account, get accredited and start investing in your choice business. Apparently, investors are eagerly voting with their wallets for what Seedrs has on offer: as an investment platform, Seedrs experienced a record-breaking year in 2019 with £283 million invested into pitches, resulting in a whopping 49% growth in investment compared to 2018. The Platform completed 250 deals in 2019, up from 186 in 2018, and delivered 7,858 investor exits on its secondary market across 317 different businesses in 2019, taking the all-time total of exits since launch to 13,671.

The global reach of Seedrs is especially valuable to Smartlands. In 2019, Seedrs helped fundraise businesses from 16 different geographies and received investment from 78 different countries. 51% of the 250 completed deals were raises of over £1 million, showing 89% growth in larger funding rounds over 2018. Highlights include Scottish fintech Paysend raising £10.7 million in Series B funding, Seedrs’ first Danish company, LuggageHero, completing a €1.5 million round, and AFC Wimbledon raising £2.4 million from over 5,000 investors in one of the UK’s largest public funding rounds for a football club.

All this is to say that for Smartlands the choice of Seedrs as a platform for our latest funding round is far from random. To the already extensive business development toolbox Smartlands has at hand, Seedrs adds support at all stages of the fundraising lifecycle helping us build momentum and reaching our target so we can fulfill our goal of transitioning from a digital securities issuance platform to a global digital banking ecosystem. Following the raise, we will continue to develop our product and strive to acquire the best talent on the market building a holistic ecosystem of Smartlands and Smartlands-powered digital banking-like service Smartee.

But most importantly, with the move on Seedrs, we want to inspire our fan base bringing as many of you as possible on-board as shareholders regardless of the size of your stake. Ultimately, that is the reason why we are going with Seedrs – to let those of you who already know, love and trust our brand that a raise with Seedrs is an all-access opportunity to become financially invested in the Smartlands future long after our funding round is complete.