With IPO’s dying and more growth stage investing occuring in the private markets, it is important that investors have access to this $13 trillion asset class.

For years, private equity has been an opaque industry controlled by a small networks of Venture Capitalist and Private Equity shops. Thanks to a change in regulation that was fully enacted 3 years ago (Title III-V of The JOBS Act), now all Americans can invest in private companies including startups and growth stage companies online with more transparency and access then has ever existed before.

Over $1Bn dollars and over 1,000 deals have been invested into companies via Regulation Crowdfunding (Reg CF) and Regulation A+ (Reg A+) deals, which allow non-accredited ‘aka’ non-millionaires to partake in the upside of investing in growthstage companies on marketplaces like Netcapital and continues to grow rapidly. RegCF alone grew over 178% between 2016 and 2017.

Accredited investors can also utilize RegD506c to invest in even more deals online. From pre-seed to pre-IPO, growth stage investments have never been more accessible to the general public.

However, a major gap currently exists in this space. If you have ever invested in the public market then you know that there are a plethora of investment decision resources at your disposal: from Investopedia for education, to Zacks and SeekingAlpha for research, to Morningstar for ratings, and Bloomberg for analytics.

Unfortunately, the tools for education, research, ratings and analytics that exist in the public arena don’t exist in the newly accessible online private markets. As a result, investors looking for Reg CF, Reg A+ and RegD 506c deals struggle to find similar independent and unbiased decisioning resources that can help them make informed investment decisions.

It’s like imagining a world where only Dow Jones and Nasdaq existed with no publications or research tools to figure out where to find good deals to partake in and what deals to avoid. It’s a major gap and hindrance to individuals/institutions trying to invest in this asset class.

This lack of decisioning resources, along with a general lack of awareness around the private market asset class from investors leads them to:

• Not partake in startup investing at all
• Not partake in more than 1 deal (due to poor experience)
• Partake, but without making an optimized investment decision

If we want this new emerging market to grow efficiently, then we need more resources to simplify and inform the investment decision making process.

The KingsCrowd Solution:

KingsCrowd is building the first independent and unbiased data driven online private market ratings and analytics platform powered by artificial intelligence that captures, rates, and tracks growth stage companies.

We are working to build the most comprehensive database of rated* private companies across key metrics, augmented by financial and operating data required to be filed by the SEC, and follow on funding / performance data from outsourced providers.

Through our robust in-house proprietary due diligence we are taking the guesswork out of investing in this asset class.

This enables KingsCrowd to create a predictive Artificial Intelligence (AI) driven startup investing platform that allows us to identify the factors that drive outsized startup investment returns…

Something that has never been possible because of a lack of data transparency, which is solved for by platforms like Netcapital.

Our data driven ratings platform will enable both individual and institutional investors to build diversified portfolios in a quick, informed way.

Note: *Companies are rated across market size, founder experience, terms, business model, product / service differentiators. Within each of these rating criteria are three 10 point scales that are standardized to create 15 standardized proprietary structured data points to inform our rating scores.

Over the past 9 months the competitors we initially identified have become more allies than competitors.

In fact, we acquired one of our competitors in Crowditz, which has provided us a significant advantage as this team had been collecting data on the RegCF market for the past couple of years.

The CTO of Crowditz has continued to support our efforts to integrate Crowditz into our new data architecture, which will enable our future AI efforts.

We have also built relationships with some of our other competitors where we execute on joint initiatives. We truly believe in the idea that 1+1=3, and that working to build a collaborative ecosystem will benefit all of us in an outsized way.

Over the past 9 months we have learned what our customer looks like.

Amongst our 3,500 subscribers, our core user is a 35-55 year old individual slanted towards males, who make $100K to $250K+ per year and are looking to invest $10K+ into private companies yearly. Historically these individuals have invested in 10+ private companies to date on platforms like Netcapital.

With this user profile, we have focused on three distribution channels for selling the KingsCrowd ratings and analytics products and have engaged in business development discussions with 15+ financial organizations that cater to this type of individual with several discussions moving into the later stages.

Collectively these channels represent over 60M potential users for KingsCrowd to pursue. We plan to monetize utilizing subscriptions / licensing deals as illustrated below.

Over the next 2 years with the capital raised we plan to get 2-3 licensing partnerships live with 500K+ users accessing KingsCrowd ratings, have 5-10 family offices representing 500+ families live, and have 25K individual subscribers to the KingsCrowd platform.

Since launching KingsCrowd in May of 2018, we have made significant strides on capital raising, product development and distribution.

As mentioned above, from a distribution / business development perspective our acquisition of Crowditz gives us a data advantage and accelerates our ability to build out our ratings platform. We also acquired all subscribers in the acquisition.

Additionally, we have developed our thinking around how to scale this business cost efficiently by partnering / licensing our ratings through larger distribution channels (e.g., self-directed IRA providers, alternative brokerage accounts, financial publications, B2B) and have built a deep pipeline of business development sales opportunities across all of these key channels.

Some names we have started to collaborate with include Rocket Dollar, Wealth Noir, and Newchip. We have also started working with other key players in the space that we can’t disclose just yet, but collectively represent 100’s of thousands of users that will have access to KingsCrowd ratings.

We’ve also bolstered our advisory board with experts across data science, venture capital, marketing and strategy who are helping to shape KingsCrowd.

• The DCU FinTech Innovation Center Announces Summer 2018 Cohort
• KingsCrowd Provides Actionable Startup Investment Research
• Startup Spotlight: KingsCrowd
• KingsCrowd Wants to Become Morningstar of Crowdfunding
• Most Influential Entrepreneurs of 2018
• How I Maxed Out My First Equity Crowdfunding Raise
• KingsCrowd Building A New Rating System For Startups