EasyEquities puts startup crowdfunding offering ‘on hold until further notice’

Investment platform EasyEquities has put its crowdfunding startup investment offering, which was set to launch tomorrow (1 February), on hold until further notice.

Purple Group vice-president of business development Almero Oosthuizen (pictured above) informed Ventureburn of the decision yesterday in an email.

“After various attempts to make the investment process as seamless and transparent as possible for our users, we have decided that the current solution was too complex and not transparent enough to satisfy the EasyEquities mantra,” said Oosthuizen.

EasyEquities crowdfunding investment round was set to launch on 1 February

First announced last year in December, EasyEquities crowdfunding campaign entailed an indirect investment into a Mauritian entity which would then subsequently invest in the 10 startups from Startupbootcamp Cape Town‘s first cohort.

The investment round was initially slated for launch on 15 January, however this was postponed earlier this month to 1 February so that the platform could update the shareholder prospectus — which lays out the terms of the investment.

Read more: Exclusive: Startupbootcamp Cape Town, EasyEquities to crowdfund first cohort
Read more: EasyEquities postpones launch of equity crowdfunding campaign by two weeks

He said upon explaining this structure to potential investors, they expressed that they would prefer to invest in the startups directly.

The other issue the platform was facing, he explained, has to do with the fact that due to this being a foreign investment, in order to participate, potential investors would have been required to take money offshore, in US dollars.

“Taking money offshore is unfortunately still an expensive process for smaller investors that are taking less than $1500 offshore at a time, most banks charge an minimum fee of around R250 for international transfers,” he said.

“Taking all of this into consideration, we have decided to withdraw the investment opportunity from our platform. This is unfortunate, seeing that we were very excited about enabling our investors to get exposure to a group of unique startups,” he added.

Oosthuizen said that he was hopeful that in future, EasyEquities would “review the investment structure and offer our clients something that’s slightly more straight forward”.

Featured image: Purple Group vice-president for business development Almero Oosthuizen (EasyEquities via Youtube)