StartEngine continues the growth of their platform, Arrived doubles the size of their community round, and more!
StartEngine
After launching a “private” offering for SpaceX last week, StartEngine followed that up with a similar offering for Stripe.
This is an interesting debut for StartEngine Private. It seemingly signals that they’re taking a very different approach to accredited offerings than Republic or Wefunder.
StartEngine has always been a bit more… loud (for lack of a better term) in terms of its brand and marketing. They seem to be focusing on offerings for high-profile, buzzy companies to draw in investors and elevate their brand recognition. Only time will tell if this pans out into the type of growth I’m sure they’re hoping for.
That’s not all the news for StartEngine from the week though!
The company announced their first white label offering for a company called Legion Works. You can view it here. Basically, this allows companies to raise funds using a StartEngine page hosted on their own domain and without the StartEngine branding.
Lastly, the company announced the completion of the first secondary market transactions from their new “Marketplace.”
Arrived Homes
Arrived provided an update on their Wefunder campaign. The company noted they had received over $10M in reservations in two months. While that’s an exciting total, it far exceeded the amount reserved for the round. Given the demand, they announced a few updates to their campaign:
- The round had been increased to $1M from $500K
- A maximum investment of $500 had been set
Unfortunately they also included a note about now being able to “fund” your reservation which caused substantial confusion. Based on subsequent communication, it seems like things are working the same as with other Wefunder campaigns. Here’s the most relevant part from the latest update:
Funding your investment is not required at this point and investors will have at least another month to fund their investment, while we finalize the financial review. We are currently in the final stages of finalizing our reviewed financials and Form CF filing, and we expect to move toward completing this round in the next month.
– Arrived campaign update
We’re happy to see Arrived giving people a chance to invest in the company, especially through a familiar and accessible platform like Wefunder.
However, we’re a bit concerned to see the confusion among the Arrived team about how the process works. We hope this will encourage Wefunder to review their documentation, onboarding, and educational materials to see if they can improve things for the companies looking to raise on their platform in the future.
Fundhomes
Fundhomes first SEC-qualified vacation rental offering officially opened up this week. The Orlando property already has 57 investors with 25% of shares sold. The minimum investment is $100.
Fundrise
Fundrise has made another addition to their innovation fund. They announced that they actually led the investment round for proptech company Inspectify, while contributing $4M from the fund.
This might be a case where Fundrise has a bit of an inside edge. Not only are they a real estate technology company, Fundrise is also one of Inspectify’s largest customers. That means they know the product and the value it brings to customers very well.
Republic
Serve Robotics, a company that raised funds through the Republic Deal Room (offerings for accredited investors) is going public!
Yieldstreet
This week Yieldstreet announced the details of their new loyalty program.
There are 3 tiers – Gold, Platinum, and Diamond based on account balance. Crossing $100K brings you into the Gold tier and opens up the benefits. These include things like exclusive offerings, early access to offerings, portfolio reviews, priority support, and various “events and experiences.”
