Equity crowdfunding platform Seedrs is reporting a record year for the company with more than £85m invested into 158 deals on the platform.
The London-based company has now surpassed £190m in investments into campaigns with 450 deals completed since launching four-and-a-half years ago.
October saw the most-active single month in the company’s history with almost £20m invested into deals.
The record for Seedr’s largest ever campaign was broken in the month with Perkbox securing £4.35m.
The record for the most investors in a single round also fell with WeSwap attracting almost 3,000 investors to its £2.4m round.
2016 also saw a UK equity crowdfunding-backed firm list in an IPO for the first time, giving Seedrs investors liquidity on a public stock exchange.
Edinburgh-based accounting software provider FreeAgent raised £10.7m in its listing on the London Alternative Investment Market (AIM) in November.
Seedrs CEO and co-founder Jeff Lynn said: “The on-going success of many of our portfolio companies is exactly why equity crowdfunding is instrumentally important to the future of the early stage investment and why sophisticated investors should be looking at this asset class as a part of their broader investment portfolio in 2017.â€
In the wake of the Brexit vote the company continued to expand around Europe opening offices in Berlin and Amsterdam.
Across the wider crowdfunding space there is a growing interest from traditional investors and in 2016 Seedrs saw a range of VC and strategic investors contribute to campaigns.
These include Draper Esprit, Ascot Capital, Zoopla, Unilever Ventures, JamJar Ventures, Passion Capital, IW Capital, Techstars and Seedcamp.
The company also took steps to address the issue of transparency in the crowdfunding market by releasing a portfolio update.
Using Ernst & Young validated methodology and International Private Equity and Venture Capital (IPEV) guidelines, the report offers analysis of all the platform’s deal and their performance.
It claims the data showed an internal rate of return (IRR) of 14.4% (non-tax adjusted) and 49.1% IRR (tax adjusted).
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