More than 30 sign-ups to Uprise.Africa SA’s first equity crowdfunding site

Over 30 investees and investors have signed up to Uprise.Africa, South Africa’s first equity crowdfunding platform, since its landing page went live on Friday, the platform’s founder Patrick Schofield said today.

A soft launch for the platform took place at a panel discussion held by Moneyweb.

Schofield, who is also the founder of donations based crowdfunding site ThundaFund.com, told Ventureburn today that the platform is looking to go live in October with six deals.

However, he added that this was dependent on the Financial Services Board (FSB) approving the platform’s current structure.

The idea is that deals on the platform would first be approved by venture capital (VC) funds before being placed on the platform for other investors to consider. A VC or angel investor would then agree to provide a sizeable portion of the required equity for the investee company.

Equity crowdfunding platform is looking to go live in October with six deals

Schofield said the FSB had held an internal meeting on crowdfunding about 10 days ago, but added that he could not comment more on what was discussed there.

Read more: FSB misses its own crowdfunding deadline
Read more: SA’s first equity crowdfunding platform to launch later this month

He added that there are more entrepreneurs that he and his team are in talks with, but that they would only go with those that are likely to prove the most successful.

Local pub and restaurant Beerhouse is expected to be among the platform’s first six deals. Schofield said Randolf Jorberg, who owns three Beerhouse outlets, is keen to use the platform to fund the launch of his next outlet.

At the panel discussion Schofield said Jorberg had indicated that a key advantage of raising the capital via a crowdfunding site is that it will help market the new outlet, while securing members of the public that have an active stake in the success of the outlet.

Schofield said he would continue to work with the FSB to ensure that regulators craft rules that benefit the entire equity crowdfunding sector.

While Brazil became the latest country earlier this month to issue regulations (see this story), Schofield singled out the UK and pointed to a recent Forbes magazine article that revealed that 21% of all venture capital funding in the UK is now carried out through crowdfunding platforms.