DealMaker: Investor Crowdfunding for Founders

DealMaker is transforming the capital raise process into simple eCommerce while harnessing the power of community to transform how founders raise capital

Capital Raising Re-imagined

Getting adequately funded is one of the biggest challenges faced by early-stage companies. No matter what business you are in, if you want to start one or grow one, you need capital. Despite VCs now sitting on over half a trillion in the bank to put to work ($586 billion in 2022) , it’s still not so easy for founders to raise capital. This is where alternative routes of funding come in the picture.

Individual investors want more access to private, early-stage deals than ever, and because of changes in regulations, there’s been an explosion of platforms offering investors the ability to invest in the latest hot private companies early in their development.

Despite all this interest on both sides of the equation, early stage startup investing remains fragmented, confusing, clunky and closed off to most who want to get into the game.

Enter DealMaker, a revolutionary end-to-end capital raising platform that’s simplifying, streamlining and lowering the cost of raising capital for founders through the power of technology and community.

Summary

Democratizing Capital Raising
Making Deals and Taking Names
Not a One-Size-Fits-All
The Bottom Line

Democratizing Capital Raising

Raising capital is a messy, clunky, expensive, and fragmented process, held hostage by small groups of Angel Investors, Venture Capitalists, and Investment Banks. As an entrepreneur who needs funding, your path to cash involves either hundreds of meetings with ‘deal guys’ in the hope they’ll see value in your business or running around trying to source small investments from your own network. This is a huge time-suck and limits access to capital for those who don’t find golfing with their dad’s connections decked out in plaid as an enjoyable way to spend their Sundays.

To fight back, crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and IndieGoGo began popping up post-Great Financial Crisis to help broaden access to capital for founders. It wasn’t until Obama’s 2012 JOBs act (Regulation Crowdfunding bill) however where true capital raising democratization started taking off via equity crowdfunding (aka Investor Crowdfunding).

Since the JOBs act, the SEC has been removing capital raising regulation roadblocks through revamping Reg CF , Reg A and Reg D private offerings. These legislation changes have opened major opportunities for non-accredited investors (i.e., the general public) to put their money to work.

That’s a lot of legal mumbo jumbo, but the ‘so what’ is that equity crowdfunding (ECF) is now seen as a viable way for founders to raise money, and for non-accredited investors to get a piece of early stage startup equity.

The number of platforms that facilitate equity crowdfunding capital raising has exploded. In 2021, there were over 1400 different crowdfunding platforms in the U.S alone and by 2025, the crowdfunding market is set to grow by nearly $200 billion, a CAGR of 15% .

Making Deals and Taking Names

Seeing the inefficient capital raising experience most founders were still going through and the regulatory changes around crowdfunding, securities lawyers Mat Goldstein and Rebecca Kacaba saw an opportunity to make things better. In 2018, they founded DealMaker to make this messy process as easy as ecommerce.

DealMaker is thinking differently about all aspects of capital raising and bringing an end-to-end suite of primary issuance, shareholder management, and offering management tools to the market. With DealMaker, founders can simply add an ‘INVEST NOW’ button on their website and the DealMaker tech on the back-end handles the rest. Founders own their investor funnel, can target investors with the highest likelihood of investing through proprietary analytics, and the compliance, payments, and share issuance is all handled on DealMaker’s tech. The company also offers an in house marketing team that helps scale offering campaigns and position companies for capital raising success.

Not a One-Size-Fits-All

Despite how exciting crowdfunding is, it’s not just sunshine and rainbows. Most platforms just aggregate investment opportunities into a list where all of the deals compete for the same set of investor eyeballs.

Traditional platforms also don’t provide ongoing support for helping the founders build their audience, optimize the channels, or streamline the funding round end-to-end when it comes to KYC, payments, and share issuance. Going to a ‘marketplace’ can put founders at the mercy of the platform and the quality of folks on it. They are typically promised thousands of investors, and in reality see a very, very small fraction of that.

DealMaker is flipping the script. Its tools and technology put control back in the hands of founders. DealMaker is the only equity crowdfunding platform enabling founders to create online storefronts for raising capital from their community.

The model works. To date, DealMaker has processed $1.7B + in transactions through 689,000 + investments, was just named Canada’s 3rd fastest growing company, and Rebecca, co-founder and CEO, was named one of Canada’s most powerful women.

The Bottom Line

Amidst a dormant IPO and VC market, bank failures (RIP Silvergate and SVB), and choppy capital markets, DealMaker is leading the charge in helping founders access capital in non-traditional ways. Despite the chaos, equity crowdfunding remained resilient in 2022 growing 16% and Reg CF deals gained in popularity .

While Jerome Powell continues to drive bearish investor sentiment, a recent survey by Crowdfund Insider, suggests that investors are still looking for ways to get in early on promising private market deals . These key trends and rumours of more potential regulatory changes afoot, paint a promising picture for DealMaker as an attractive bright spot in the capital markets storm.

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