Invesdor, a Finnish equity crowdfunding company, announced today that they received an investment from Taaleritehdas, a local wealth management company with over €2.6 billion under management. It was immediately interesting to point out that the money was not raised through their own platform. Instead it was a deal in which Taaleritehdas Asset Management Ltd acquired Invesdor shares.
Companies such as Fundedbyme chose to go the other way and crowdfunded themselves in order to showcase their system. So we reached out to Lasse Mäkela, the CEO of Invesdor for comments.
According to Mäkela, this is more of a strategic investment, whereby all parties should benefit from it. “We feel like there are a lot of benefits for the Invesdor and the development of the service itself as well as the companies that will be raising funds through Invesdor as well.” commented Mäkela.
The actual amount of the investment was not disclosed, but Taaleritehdas Oy purchased 11.05% of Invesdor Oy shares. Mäkela did comment that: “It is a nice addition to what we are doing. At a decent, nice valuation.” Still, the real story here does not lie in the investment in of itself but more in the actual partnership between the two companies.
According to Karri Haaparinne, the Executive Vice president of Taaleritehdas, this is a new way to invest into unlisted companies.“Taaleritehdas wants to be involved in developing the service, and thus also carry out its own mission of developing the Finnish capital markets and increasing the Finnish ownership. At the same time, with this investment, we want to ensure the most suitable partner, with whom we can credibly build a new form of funding for Finnish growth companies.* says Haaparinne.
This would make it seem that in addition to the investment, Taaleritehdas will also evaluate Invesdor as a partner for their future investment deals, which might make it a nice boost for companies that try to raise funding through Invesdor. However we could not confirm this as Mäkela commented that there is currently no direct agreements to this effect. That being said, Taaleritehdas does have over 2 100 customers and the goal of the deal was to “bridge the gap between the traditional investment money and the crowdfunding worlds” according to Mäkela.
Equity crowdfuding is a hot area of discussion with many companies already fighting for market share. Who do you think is going to win? Let us know in the comments.
