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11-28-2019, 10:40
Crowst wins over angel investors at Slush
Autumn 2019 has been busy for business angels, as an international syndicate of 30 investors have gone through 130 companies which applied for the Nordic Angel Program at Slush. From all those companies, one stood out from the crowd. Crowst will now receive an angel investing round of €300 000 to open up new markets.
A record-number of 30 angel investors participated in the Nordic Angel Program at Slush. FiBAN’s syndication service has already culminated into three successful funding rounds, with some fantastic investment targets: Screenful, FeelingStream and Duuers. This autumn, angel investors, following the lead of Tuomas Pahlman and Reima Linnanvirta, went through 130 companies to find the best one in Slush’s deal flow. After months of reviewing, interviewing, due diligence and negotiating, Crowst came out as the number one company and will receive the syndicate’s €300 000 investment.
Crowst is an insights platform that helps marketing departments gain real-time on-location consumer feedback at a low cost. “Crowsters”, as they call their users, redeem gift cards for the amount of reviews they do, as well as getting the chance to influence the market.
The Crowst team has already gained benefits from the angel investors: “On being shortlisted in the top 15 after the initial online process, it was very valuable to spar one-on-one with the investors to hear their feedback, challenging our own thinking. The deep-dive done during the due diligence process was quite thorough and made us sweat through the discussions with the lead investors. It is great to have eventually earned their confidence in our business and be selected for investment. We look forward to leveraging the wealth of experience and expertise the angel syndicate brings as part of this investment program”, comments Richard Jerome, CEO and cofounder of Crowst.
Good founders that work well together were very important for the investors. “Early stage is all about focus and execution. Crowst team was not as advanced as some others, but they actually convinced us actually by not doing some important stuff. Because they had done the more important stuff. And they had done it darn well and focused on what matters so far”, describes Tuomas Pahlman, co-lead of the syndicate.
This autumn, the investor group was large and diverse, and so were the top 15 companies. This represents in a way what angel investing is: in a big syndicate, there’s a lot of know-how about all kinds of technologies and industries, and therefore, there’s room to invest into whatever interesting technology there is. In this round, industries varied from health tech to insect-based cleantech, from surveys to cloud-service for apps. Not only that, but the companies had founders who were originally from all around the world, from India to Latvia. “It was interesting to see that there was no single vertical dominating the Top-15. Instead, everything from EdTech to LegalTech, PropTech to FoodTech and B2B SaaS to environmental hardware was represented. This comes to show that good investment cases can rise from any vertical”, concludes co-lead Reima Linnanvirta.
The whole list of top 15 companies by Nordic Angel Program at Slush:
- Manna Insect
- Elias Robot_
- HealthDX
- Crowst
- React & Share
- AUVC Tech
- Caidio
- Resimator
- Dealsign
- Nevercode
- Statzon
- Absolute Module
- Datainvision
- Superlect
- Aeromon
Find more information and read the original article here.