Angel Insights Blog
Friday, March 27, 2015
Crowdfunding Hype – Join Me at the ACA Summit
By: Bill Payne, Frontier Angels
The popular press has been hyping crowdfunding since the JOBS Act passed in 2010. The Huffington Post tells us that the #1 Losers of the JOBS Act is Angel Investors! AngelList and Kickstarter (and their facilitated companies) are getting considerable attention and Lending Club had a huge IPO in December. Just how large is this crowdfunding movement in the US? And, how is it impacting seed stage and early stage investing which has been dominated by angels for the past several decades?
During the past several months, I have been on a mission to quantify the several types of crowdfunding, both in the US and the rest of the world. We hear crowdfunding exceeded $10 billion worldwide in 2014. But, how much of that was equity crowdfunding? In the US, all equity crowdfunding is accredited investor only. What can we learn from Europe about the quantity of unaccredited investor (public) crowdfunding, compared to all other crowdfunding?
I’ve put together a pretty good estimate of total crowdfunding by category in the US in 2014. And, comparing those results to published tabulations in Europe (which has been crowdfunding longer than we have), the US market is similar to that being experienced by our colleagues across the pond.
I will present my findings at the ACA Summit in San Diego on April 15th and then Matthew Le Merle and I will provide some insights into the impact of crowdfunding on angel investing in the future. See you there!
Tags: Crowdfunding Summit
