Digital savings account Chip has raised £11.5m in what is to date the biggest equity crowdfund held on investment crowdfunding platform Crowdcube.
The FinTech firm raised £11.5m from 12,954 investors and highlighted that it was able to raise £1m in under 10 minutes – a development which led to the crashing of the Crowdcube servers. The company claims this raise is so far the biggest equity crowdfund of 2021.
Following the crowdfund, Chip said it added 6,500 new investors and grew its shareholder community to over 23,000 – making it the second largest investor community in the UK FinTech market.
Back in September, Chip said it was looking to raise up to £20m through the crowdfunding campaign – meaning the company missed its aim by £8.5m.
Founded in 2016, Chip claims it on a mission to build the best savings account in the world. The company’s platform analyses users’ transactions and calculates what they are able to afford to save every few days. The users are still in control, however, and can cancel or emend any of the auto-saves before they happen.
The recent raise follows a strong year for Chip, who saw its revenues hike by over 500% as well as seeing its user base grow by over 60% to over 400,000, while the total amount of saves processed grew to over £640m.
Chip claims it plans to use the newly raised capital to fuel growth activities across marketing, product and technology as well as significantly increasing the size of the team as it looks toward expanding over Europe.
Chip CEO and founder Simon Rabin said, “We’ve been blown away by the response to our latest crowdfunding campaign. This is a huge validation of the strong position Chip is in, and our ambitions to build the next fintech unicorn.
“We have massive plans for the next 12 months. From a product perspective, we’re looking at more market-leading savings accounts, more investment funds, and more automatic investing. We also have aggressive growth plans, across several marketing channels, as we aim to increase our user base further.
“It’s safe to say this is extraordinary, we’re very excited about all the incredible features we’re going to deliver, the growth this round is going to fuel, and having even more shareholders and users on board for the next stage of our journey. We’re building the best savings account in the world, and we’ve only just begun.”
Earlier this year, Chip launched ChipX, a new membership plan that aims to boost access to more investment funds from BlackRock for its users.
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