Seedrs reports 12% IRR across its platform

Private equity investment platform, Seedrs report a 12 percent IRR platform-wide in its latest Portfolio Update

The autumn 2018 edition of Seedrs’ Portfolio Update analyses the characteristics and performance of the deals funded on the platform. From the last report back in 2016, a further 202 deals have been made, making the total number of deals since the 2012 launch, being 779.

Overall, the data continues to find that Seedrs investments have seen outstanding performance and return when compared to other asset classes.

Across the 17 sectors Seedrs’ invests in, no one sector accounted for more than 12 percent of the portfolio. Food and Beverage made up 11.44 percent of deals, Finance and Payments 11.27 percent and Home and Personal, 11.09 percent – being the largest performing sectors.

Almost half of their portfolio is made up of B2C businesses, with B2B accounting for 30 percent and a mix of B2B/B2C making up the rest.

Straight equity campaigns have funded three-quarters of deals and a further 20 percent were funded through fund campaigns, the update found. All of the rest of the deals were convertibles.

All of the deals together were found to have made a platform-wide IRR of 12.02% – amounting to 26.42% when EIS and SEIS tax reliefs were accounted for.

The largest rate of return (non-tax adjusted) was found for Finance and Payments at 21.96 percent, Home and Personal at 21.78 percent and Programming and Security at 18.82 percent.

They found that the top ten percent of investors who had made ten or more investments, had received phenomenal IRRs of 47.90 percent – when tax adjusted reaching 62.45 percent.

CEO, Jeff Kelisky stated how the latest report reflects the companies positive returns they offer to investors from early-stage private equity. He believes ‘’a 12.02 percent platform-wide IRR is very strong, outperforming most other asset classes even before tax reliefs are taken into account.’’ He goes on to add how the most exciting part of the report is how well the top quartile of their investors performance. ‘’One of our aims has always been to create a marketplace that enables investors to choose the businesses they want to back and earn returns based on how well they have selected – just as venture capital investors do. The performance of our investors shows that we are doing just that.

Jeff Lynn, co-founder and Executive Chairman also commented: ‘’One of our overarching goals when founding Seedrs was to bring the sort of data and transparency to the market for private equity that exists in other assets’’. He states how their Portfolio Updates are a way to do this and allow investors and others to ‘’quantify what is happening in our market’’.   He states there is a lot more they will do, going forward, regarding sharing data, but with the new edition of the Portfolio Update, they are pleased. ‘’We are continuing to push forward with our quest to rationalize this part of the capital markets’’.