Times are tough folks, COVID-19 has run many of us through the financial wringer. It's hard to know where to invest when even the worlds biggest fund managers are pale-faced reviewing their balance sheet. Startups have proven, in the past, to be a great source of return both to invest in and to be involved in. Some of these community-driven Fintechs are rewriting the finance sector and providing a potentially safe haven (and, dare I say it, even some profit) in the choppy waters of Coronavirus.
Seedrs, for those of you who are not familiar with it, is a crowdfunding platform that gives investors the opportunity to invest in the growth of startups and companies looking to expand their operations, from as little as £25. Seedrs Alumnus include challenger bank Revolut which is now valued in the billions of dollars. A bona fide fintech 'Unicorn'. Investors in Revolut's early-stage crowdfunding celebrated a return of 1900% in 2018, which I think you'll agree is not too shabby! Of course, not every investment will offer this kind of return but I decided to put together a shortlist of 3 of my favourites to watch right now.
As a writer, I am primarily interested in companies and startups that have the common theme of trying to empower the everyday investor, those who do not have millions of pounds of capital to invest but would still like to see a reasonable return on their money. Here is my pick of a few to watch and you will find them all crowdfunding on Seedrs now.
- PYNK - a globally-minded, investment portfolio that aims to be truly inclusive, fee-free and community co-created.
I've started with my favourite! Pynk is a managed investment portfolio like no other. Bold words, I know but in this case, I think I can make a point in case. Pynk allows its crowd to earn through predicting; in other words, each day 'Pynksters' (as they are affectionately known) can make a price prediction on one of three asset classes - Bitcoin, NASDAQ and Gold. the accuracy of these predictions determines how many 'Wisdom Points' the crowd member earns. At the end of each quarter, 'Wisdom Points' are converted into a dollar value and that money is invested into Pynks managed investment portfolio. Think of it kind of like a pension fund that you don't have to make any financial contributions to!
Worried that you wouldn't be good at predicting asset prices? that's absolutely fine - studies of crowd wisdom data has shown that aggregation of imperfect data creates quite surprisingly accurate results - something which Pynk explain a little better in their Seedrs crowdfund launch video. Of course, you can also choose to go the old fashioned route and just invest some of your hard-earned cash.
The graph above shows how Pynk's alpha trading product has compared against the recent COVID-19 Bitcoin crash. As you'll see their combination of Crowd wisdom data and artificial intelligence managed to call the crash and even profit from it!
How does it work? Pynk aggregates the crowd data, collected from the predictions mentioned above, and these are fed into their proprietary AI system, they then use this data to make pinpoint investment decisions. This forms the basis of how Pynk makes money and how they, in turn, reward their crowd for making predictions. Moreover, for members of the crowd who make regular predictions via their beta tool, Pynk offers zero-fee access to their
managed portfolio when it launches sometime very soon! exciting times indeed!
Pynk is building up quite a community and their focus is on true, financial inclusivity and giving people, who may have previously been denied access to managed funds such as this through geographical or financial restrictions, the opportunity to get involved. It's one of the main reasons Pynk makes the top of the list and why I have enjoyed following their early days and participating in their BETA stage.
you can sign up for Pynk here
2. Brickowner - A fresh take on property investment that cuts out the middlemen.
Following on from the theme of financial inclusivity comes my second pick - Brickowner. Starting in 2017 Brickowner is working to create property investment opportunities for the everyday investor. Investments that were previously only available to those with large amounts of capital. Brickowner aggregates these smaller amounts from many investors, enabling them to access these managed investment opportunities. Asset managers can also access Brickowner to raise capital and allow them to focus on the development of their properties whilst Brickowner takes care of all the red tape involved in managing their investors. Creating a flywheel of mutual benefit between investors and fundraisers.
Brickowner offers a variety of investment properties which can be selected when choosing to invest and are, reassuringly, upfront about the projected 1 or 2-year returns. Many of the properties advertised predict 15% plus (and often, considerably more) over the first year and as much as 72% in some cases over two years. Compare that to your average bank account interest (from 2018) of 1.8% and I think this one's a bit of a 'no brainer'.
Property has long been a keen source of interest from people looking to invest and, with recent changes to taxation for landlords in the UK, owning and renting a property as a landlord or investor has seen diminishing returns over recent years. Brickower seems to me to offer a unique take on property investment which cuts out a lot of red tape for prospective investors and even, in some cases, better returns.
You can visit Brickowner here
3. Smartlands - Tokenised, blockchain-backed assets
Smartlands offers a unique value proposition in that is seeks to tokenise any lucrative, illiquid asset. Including, but not limited to, precious metals, disruptive technologies, agriculture SME's and almost anything else you can think of. Assets are broken down into tokenised form and the buyer has the same rights as any other asset owner.
Smartlands have also built around their core concept a unique ecosystem which includes a marketplace, a current account featuring payment card and a mobile app called Smartee which offers a number of features including digital to fiat currency transfer, peer to peer lending and more. As you can imagine which such a complex project there are some countries who are not eligible to join at this stage so please do check the list of countries on their website before joining.
Smartlands is the kind of project that you could write a whole piece about as it has many different facets to it but certainly, the idea that you can literally take anything of value to anyone, tokenise it and sell it is a very interesting one. The old days of distrust of blockchain seem to be passing now and It's nice to see a project like Smartlands raising capital on a site like Seedrs in the traditional sense rather than 'airdrops' or one of the many other routes some less savoury blockchain projects use.
Lastly, what's interesting about Smartlands and what seems to be a common thread through my list is that they offer access to assets in fractional form so that you can invest in the things which interest you (such as property or precious metals) even if you don't have huge amounts of capital to do so.
If you're interested in finding out more about Smartlands you can do so here
As with any project or investment, there are always inherent risks in investing your money, capital is at risk, so please don't trust the word of some guy blogging on coil! do your own research before committing and always, always invest money which you can afford to see depreciate as well as appreciate in value. If you want to invest in the companies themselves you can do so over on the Seedrs website, by following the links provided below (these are not referrals, I do not receive anything for your interest)
All images in this article are courtesy and property of the noted respective startups and permissions have been given in each respective case for their use.
