An online marketplace for UK products through which users receive on average a 10% discount compared to Amazon.co.uk. It has just launched its B2B offering, SKUcloud.co.uk, through which websites and apps will be able to generate revenues through the sale of any of 55 million relevant/targeted third-party products to their users, directly on their own website.
An important one. From three high net worth individuals who invested in Flubit.com using EIS, the number of external investors has grown to 50 of which 29 have invested via EIS, providing around a third of its total funding. Not only that, but many of Flubit’s investors found out about it from the original three EIS investors, demonstrating how EIS plays an important role in helping to create networks of angel investors who often collaborate to help businesses grow.
“EIS funding has been great for us. By the time we received EIS investment, we had already been running for a couple of years, but EIS money helped us to build on that by scaling up quickly and effectively. We went from around 25 people to about 50 practically overnight. We needed to do this in order to achieve the growth targets we’d set ourselves and EIS money was a significant part of the funding that made that possible.
“EIS is an excellent option for investors because of the tax reliefs they receive, but it’s also been an excellent deal for us.”
The equity split is fair with EIS – investors get a return on what they put in, they don’t ask for more or seek complicated remuneration arrangements. Had we gone down the venture capital route in the early stages, yes, we would still have got the funding, but the deal would likely have been structured in such a way as to disproportionately reward the VC company for our success, and in the early days it’s important to have some financial flexibility, which a VC deal may not provide.”