Yesterday at 11:00 UTC our smart contracts closed the Neufund (Fifth Force GmbH) ETO. This event marks the first successful ETO on our platform. Time to celebrate! In this blog post, we give you a recap of all the amazing things which happened this year and an outlook for our plans for 2019.
Let’s start with the most important news first. During our one week long pre-sale and another week of public sale, we’ve raised an overall amount of €3.4 Million. This was the first successful offering of tokenized equity to the general public. We are grateful to our investors who have put their trust in us and are delighted to see the high demand in our offering. And we would also like to say thank you to those members of our community who weren’t able to invest. Despite the high ticket size you continued to support us.
Neufund has made it easy for anyone to access investment opportunities, that most of the time are available exclusively to prominent investors, and we are very excited that our offer has attracted a number of diverse European investors like Udo Schloemer (Factory Berlin founder and CEO), Chris Zippel (award-winning music producer and composer), and Dario Suter (movie producer, DCM founder and managing director). We have also managed to secure the support of our existing investors including Christophe Maire (Atlantic Labs) and Frank Thelen (Freigeist Capital).
Our investors have something in common: all of them see an opportunity in the rapidly growing market of Blockchain-based fundraising. Most of the funding came in fiat currency (EUR), proving that Blockchain is much more than just cryptocurrencies. In exchange for their investment, they will receive ERC20 equity tokens, “FTH”, operating on the Ethereum Blockchain. Additionally, our token model includes the distribution of NEU tokens to everyone who invests on our platform.
Now, the next steps in finalizing the ETO are the signing and notarization of the Investment and Shareholder’s Agreement by Fifth Force GmbH and the nominee, the registration of the capital increase into the German Commercial Registry, and eventually in February 2019, the distribution of the FORCE and NEU tokens to our investors. The last step is the distribution of payouts to all NEU token holders.
This year’s highlights
The past 12 months have been very intense. But, none of our achievements would have been possible without each and every Neufunder. We started into the year in January with nine team members and got 20 new colleagues over the course of 2018.
One of the biggest announcements from 2018 were the first eleven companies which committed to do an ETO with us. In June we announced Brille24, mySWOOOP, Uniti, Emflux, Next Big Thing and Blockstate. A month later we announced Founders Bank and in December we announced an addition of four companies. This includes Agora.Trade, Curf, Air Profile, and Ngrave. You can learn more about the companies on our platform page.
To make all those upcoming ETOs possible it needs a stable regulatory ground. That is why we continued this year to advise governments on DLT regulation. This includes working together with German lawmakers and regulators, including Senator Thomas Heilmann and the Digital Minister, Dorothee Bär, as well as the German financial supervisory authority, Bafin. Passing new laws can be a cumbersome process, but innovation doesn’t wait. To propel Germany to the top of startup nations, our CEO, Zoe, wrote together with our investor, Frank Thelen, an open letter to the Bundestag asking the members of the German Bundestag to put DLT-specific guidance into place.
“We were more than astonished about the positive reaction from the regulator’s side. Only several weeks after sending the letter we were invited to a meeting at the Bundestag chaired by Senator Heilmann. During the meeting, he proposed an amendment of an already existing law to incorporate security tokens. I think that this is an important first step and I am looking forward to further talks in 2019,” Zoe Adamovicz, CEO and Co-founder at Neufund.
All of those efforts would be useless if it wasn’t for the fact that we got a first-class investment platform up and running. We’ve built an amazing platform that connects issuers with a global pool of investors from more than 90 countries. Our developers submitted 10580 commits and 1850+ pull requests (and remained in the top 10 Blockchain development teams worldwide!), we’ve organized and participated in more than 40 events and visited 13 countries.
We’ve talked with hundreds of investors wanting to enter the space and reviewed just as many applications from companies wanting to do an ETO with us. We’ve partnered with leading Blockchain & tokenization companies like Binance, BitBay, MSX of Malta Stock Exchange, Blocktrade and Ledger.
And all of that was covered by international media more than 300 times. Key milestones have been featured by Forbes, TechCrunch, Cointelegraph, Coindesk, CCN, Bloomberg, CNBC, CNN, WIRED, Business Insider, Crowdfund Insider, Venture Beat, and Cryptovest.
Additionally, we’ve continued with our community-oriented projects like the term sheet ninja, the crypto regulation map and Token Up.
Token Up is a new podcast and publication that sheds light on the emerging security token industry. In the latest episode, Alex and Marlene talk about the Neufund (Fifth Force GmbH) ETO in detail. In the new year, we’ll be writing and speaking more about security token standards, issuance platforms and the global regulatory environment for security tokens, so stay tuned!
Throughout all of these developments and achievements, we have remained driven by our underlying mission: To leverage innovation for good, enable ownership for all, and make both investing and fundraising more accessible. We want to equalize opportunity for everyone, whether it’s a young woman from the global south or an experienced entrepreneur from Silicon Valley. You can learn more about our mission and goals in our updated Light Paper 2.0 and our company pitch deck.
Blockchain makes all of this possible — and it can make it easier and cheaper, too. Why should the most profitable opportunities only be available to a select few, rich companies and individuals?
Blockchain isn’t a hype. It’s a powerful technology on which we can build multiple amazing applications — ones, that will make this world better and fairer. Earlier this year, our CEO Zoe was asked about the biggest opportunities offered by Blockchain. Her reply remains the same: Blockchain is the opportunity. All we need to do is use it wisely.
Even as the ICO hype has faded and many projects have unfortunately had to shut down, we’ve seen that investors still value projects like ours that are advancing the ecosystem in meaningful ways. Despite the “crypto winter” that has taken place during these past few months, the value of Neumark (NEU), Neufund’s protocol token, has remained relatively stable since issuance. In fact, a recent report from Wirtschaftswoche, a leading German publication, found that NEU was one of only two German blockchain projects that managed to keep the value of its token steady.
Plans for 2019
We have an exciting road ahead as we move into 2019. After the successful conclusion of the Fifth Force ETO, we expect the ten other previously announced ETOs to begin in short order. These companies are diverse in every way: they come from a wide range of industries (Internet of Things, fintech, banking, biotech, and the automotive industry), geographies (Germany, India, Sweden, Switzerland and more) and are in various growth stages (seed, series A, series D and more).
As we head into next year, we have many exciting features planned for the platform. Our focus will center on post-issuance activities for both investors and issuers. On the investor side, we plan to implement token holder and portfolio management capabilities (both for NEU and Equity Token Holders). This includes features such as dividend distribution and portfolio analytics. On the issuer side, we are planning new capabilities around cap table management and the ability to conduct follow-on rounds.
Last year our team spoke at conferences around the world. Next year you’ll be able to meet us on various occasions again. In January our Investor Relations Manager Alex will lead a workshop at the Protos Blockchain Summit in Zurich. The following month our CEO Zoe will be speaking at the M-1 Melonport conference in Zug. She will be also speaking again at CryptoChicks in Toronto, a hackathon organized by Natalia Ameline which addresses female coders and builders. And in June you can meet Zoe at Arctic15 in Helsinki.
None of our efforts would be possible without the overwhelming support of our community. You are the fuel behind Neufund. We’ve received and answered thousands of messages and felt your support with every milestone along this exciting and often unpredictable journey. You inspire us to do more, better.
So with full hearts and minds, we go into 2019 with only one resolution: To remain focused on our mission. The end of the year is a good time to reiterate our commitment to working hard, to not accepting unnecessary compromise, and to pursuing our goals with integrity and inclusivity.
It’s also the time to wish each and every one of you Happy Holidays! Let’s raise a glass to our myriad accomplishments in 2018 and look forward to more success, equality, and community in the New Year.
Best,
Zoe, Marcin, and the Neufund Team
