*UKHotViewsExtra* Connecting with Connectd!

I promised I’d take another look at early-stage funding platform Connectd to see if I could unravel the mystery of its business model (see Of funding rounds – and Inspector Montalbano).

You may recall that Connectd is essentially a marketplace where founders, investors and non-exec directors can, you guessed, connect with each other (see Backers connect with Connectd to connect founders without connections). The ‘mystery’ is that investors pay nothing – it’s the founders and NEDs who stump up the platform fee. How was that ever going to make a profit, I wondered?

What better way to solve the mystery than to speak with Connectd’s affable founder, Roei Samuel. Samuel has form as an entrepreneur. He founded a group of gaming and media companies back in 2015, which he exited to AIM-listed e-sports group Gfinity in 2018 in an all-share deal valued at £2.4m. Unfortunately, Gfinity’s shares have since crashed.

Having suffered the many joys of trying to find funding through traditional routes, Samuel decided to set about creating a self-service platform which could match both sides of the early-stage fund raising process in a more transparent manner. After a couple of years of development Connectd was ready for launch in March 2020 – just in time for the lockdown.

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Posted by Anthony Miller at '09:08' - Tagged: startup