End of year round-up 2019

Neufund
Neufund
Published in
6 min readDec 5, 2019

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It’s been a big year for Neufund — we enabled access to investment opportunities for investors of all sizes, introduced a democratized fundraising experience for companies worldwide, and made history with the world’s first retail offering. Let’s take a look back at 2019 — and discover what 2020 has in store.

The future of finance is now

We started the year with a bang — following the Fifth Force offering on Neufund, the first ever payout from NEU worth 111k EUR was distributed to NEU token holders.

In some of the biggest news of the year, we announced offerings with a ticket size of just 10 EUR, making investing in innovative companies accessible to retail investors. This also enabled Neufund to provide companies looking for fundraising opportunities with more customized, easy, automated, accessible, and efficient options tailored to their needs.

First IPO on blockchain

In September, the first ever retail offering was announced by Greyp Bikes and hosted on our platform. Altogether the campaign lasted 45 days and collected 1.4M EUR in funding from over 1000 investors from 34 countries around the world. Together, we made history — it was the first ever IPO conducted on blockchain.

The campaign demonstrated the power of turning a community into shareholders, showcased a way for companies to raise capital outside of traditional start-up hubs, and proved that blockchain makes the future of finance possible today.

Expansion and partnerships

Following discussions with the Financial Monetary Authority in Liechtenstein, Neufund was given legal clearance to begin operations in Liechtenstein, becoming the world’s first and only investment platform to be able to onboard and serve the needs of retail, venture capital, and institutional investors at the same time. This was achieved thanks to our expansion to Liechtenstein, one of the fastest-growing fintech hubs in Europe.

This expansion also enabled Neufund to offer a more diversified product portfolio, allowing the companies fundraising on our platform to conduct offerings tailored to their specific fundraising goals. While Neufund offerings are governed by German or Lichtenstein jurisdictions, companies can be incorporated from most countries around the world.

If you are looking for fundraising opportunities, get in touch!

We are also proud to partner with Verum Capital. The partnership will entail cooperation in three main areas — establishing deal-flow, providing advisory and due-diligence services to fundraising companies, and attracting institutional investors to the platform. More information to follow soon!

Brand and platform experience

In June we showcased the future of fundraising by introducing two new platform user types — issuer and nominee. Companies conducting their fundraising on Neufund can now set up their offerings within days and manage their campaign through a simple and intuitive interface.

Notably, we also automated most of the document creation, which saves time and costs in the fundraising process. Read more about the fundraising experience on Neufund here.

The investors experienced many improvements across the platform as well — from the launch of the nEUR purchase and redeem flow to enable EUR investment on the platform, to the improved transaction widgets and introduction of investment and transaction history.

Our product and marketing team began aligning and improving the design and UX to simplify the content and introduce Neufund’s brand experience across all channels, from events to the website and platform. Have a look!

To keep up to date with future platform developments, subscribe to our newsletter here or follow our monthly Product Updates.

Neufund Team

Since the beginning of 2019 we’ve onboarded 11 Neufunders. We’ve enriched every Neufund team with experts from all fields: from product to KYC to design to marketing to developers. And we are also looking forward to welcoming for four more colleagues, Pavel, Dmytro, Arjun, and Dawid, who will join us at the start of 2020.

Want to join our team? Keep a lookout for new open positions here. We are still looking for a Senior PR Manager, DevOps Engineer, Python Developer, and KYC Agent. ;)

But business is not only about business goals, KPIs, fundraising, and investing. Giving team members space to develop is equally important in making employees conscious leaders. As a team, we are constantly growing together.

Last year we read lots of books and shared them with the team during our Neuschool meetings. We ended up with a decent library of business-oriented books.

This year we decided to expand our minds. In June we invited experts on the Search Inside Yourself methodology and asked them to teach us how to be mindful leaders. The whole Neufund team spent two days completely offline (no pictures, sorry ;) on a mindful leadership training course, practicing emotional intelligence, mindfulness, and human-centric leadership skills. We implemented much of what we learned right away in our daily workstyle, and continue to follow the mindfulness and compassion program of our amazing coaches, Mounira and Angel.

reimpact

This year we also introduced reimpact, a decentralized think tank that gave us the opportunity to open a space for diverse perspectives and multidisciplinary debate about how technologies can create better companies and finance. In 2019 we held events events in Berlin, Osaka, and London, welcoming more than 150 participants and engaging more than 600 people in topics such as: What makes business successful? How do we democratize access to finance?

Check out reimpact and join us at upcoming events! https://reimpact.xyz/

Media coverage & events

We of course shared our biggest milestones with our community, but also with the media and an international audience, from Canada to Japan to Finland to Austria.

We attended 27 events worldwide, speaking at international conferences including M-1 in Zurich, Sthlm Fintech Week in Stockholm, Tech Festival in Berlin, CryptoChicks in Toronto, Arctic15’ in Helsinki, Pioneers’ in Wien, Devcon in Osaka, Süddeutsche Zeitung Wirtschaftsgipfel in Berlin, and soon at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin 2019.

We’ve been also covered by international media around 100 times. Key milestones have been featured in Forbes, Cointelegraph, Yahoo Finance, Coindesk and Financial Times.

First offering in 2020

We have some exciting news! Black One Entertainment Group is the next company to conduct an offering on Neufund at the start of 2020. Black One is a fully integrated entertainment company realizing the ultimate (eco)system to develop raw talent into sustainable global music superstars, combining key aspects of strategic talent education, training, management, and label-like services into one holistic and supportive development process.

Full investment details will follow early next year.

The year in numbers

See our success and growth in numbers! We’d like to say a special thank you to our community — none of this would be possible without your support.

Holiday break

As every year our team is taking a well-deserved holiday break. We thank you for your continued support and look forward to all the exciting things the next year will bring. Enjoy the festive season and see you soon!

Stay tuned for updates in the coming months and sign up for the newsletter here. Questions? You can check our Knowledge Base or submit a question to our Customer Care.

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Fintech startup with a mission to open the world of finance: create new markets and bring together assets, investors, and entrepreneurs.