Freetrade, a next-generation investment app providing users with free stock trading has secured an additional £3.1 million in funding through its equity crowdfunding campaign on Crowdcube. The London-based startup, which was founded in 2016 by Adam Dodds who previously worked in finance at KPMG, and co-founded by Davide Fioranelli, smashed its £500,000 target in just 12 minutes and briefly crashed the page, despite launching the round in a 24-hour private phase only open to its user waitlist and previous investors. It then hit overfunding territory raising £1 million in 28 minutes, £2.6 million in 24 hours and closed the round at £3.1 million in just 28 hours as Crowdcube’s most overfunded equity offering ever.
FreeTrade describes itself as a challenger stockbroker that provides free stock trading to mobile devices. It offers customers access to the UK and global stock markets, with zero commissions or fees.
“We started Freetrade to make investing in the stock market easy and affordable. We believe everyone should be able to own a piece of the companies that power our economy. In our opinion, stockbrokers in the UK don’t serve the needs of most investors. Commissions are expensive, minimums are high and it’s complicated to start investing. A recent survey showed 46% of Britons would like to invest in equity shares, but don’t know how. We built our tech stack from scratch. It’s cloud-native, mobile-optimized and can scale to millions of customers. It means we can offer our basic service completely free.”
Some of Freetrade’s largest investors include managers of some of the world’s most successful funds, technology entrepreneurs with nine-figure exits under their belts, and City professionals from top tier law, consulting and accounting firms. But with over 2000 participants and an average investment of £1,500, there were many more ambitious, ordinary investors taking a punchy stake in the company. The company reported it is no stranger to crowdfunding, having previously launched two earlier funding rounds pre-product. With this additional funding, Freetrade has raised a total of £4.4 million. Dodds, who is also CEO of Freetrade, then added:
“Raising an additional £3.1 million in just over a day emphasises the conviction our community has in our platform and our plans for the future. We even had people writing into our forum saying they had booked the day off work so that they wouldn’t miss out on the investment opportunity. The fact that we could have raised even more, but decided to close the round as we didn’t want to dilute the equity is truly phenomenal. The hype surrounding this funding round also highlights the appetite there is for a commission-free investment app in the UK. It’s the first of its kind in Britain which makes it even more exciting. We plan to revolutionise the investing space for those who have previously been restricted by artificial barriers like minimum account sizes, high commissions and overly complicated products – especially millennials.”
The funds will be used by Freetrade to support its next phase of rapid growth: enhancing its customer operations, product and engineering teams, expansion into EU markets, and cryptocurrency trading.
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