Crunch raise over £1m in crowdfund

Crunch are delighted and humbled to announce that we’ve absolutely smashed our first-ever crowdfunding campaign, raising a grand total of £762,711 - over £150k more than our £600k target!

UPDATE: We are very pleased to announce that we have secured additional funding of £200,003.80 from a high net worth individual. This now takes the total amount raised to a fantastic £1,008,037.20!

We’d like to take this opportunity to offer our sincerest thanks to all of our incredible investors: we’ve been truly blown away by the support we’ve received from all corners of the UK, including from members of our own Crunch community, and our wonderful team here at Crunch.

Without your support, this incredible milestone wouldn’t have been possible. Thank you, one and all!

Here’s how we made such a rousing success of our once-in-a-lifetime crowdfunding adventure!

A lightning start

Our crowdfunding campaign officially went live to the public on 15th November. Even before that, however, we were delighted to have already received £250k towards our target from private investors, submitted by our amazing chairman, Michael Van Swaaij! We went on to gain a grand total of £340k from the rest of the board here at Crunch, as well as the always supportive CEO of Crunch Mortgages, Rob Starr!

Within our first week of the public launch, Crunch had already raised 70% of our £600k target, surpassing even our wildest expectations. Angel investors were queuing up to discuss our long-term growth plans with our CEO, Darren Fell, and we were truly humbled to see more and more members of our Crunch community contributing to our crowdfunding efforts.

An unexpected hurdle

The Crunch crowdfund was reaching its pinnacle amidst the emergence of the new Omicron COVID-19 strain. Not only did increasing caution among investors make physical investor pitches harder than ever, but Darren, his wife, and two children all came down with COVID.

Disaster? For most companies, perhaps, but not at Crunch.

On went the crowdfunding efforts, with Darren and the team continuing to work late into the night to meet with prospective investors, and even in spite of the hurdles life had thrown before us, we ticked over the 90% mark, still with two weeks to spare.

With time to spare

With a week still to go before the end of our campaign, we did it: we achieved our £600k target.

If you think that reaching our target may have deterred some investors from adding to the already-completed pot, you’d be wrong! Even with our target reached, the line of interested investors wasn’t slowing down. That’s why we made the decision to extend our campaign by another week.

At that point, we had no financial target: we’d already hit our £600k figure, so who was to say how much higher our total could rise? Well, by the time our campaign officially concluded on Wednesday 8th December, we had raised a whopping £712,708 - over £100k more than we’d aimed for!

The crowdfund remained active in what’s known as “closing mode” for a few more days, allowing a few more donations to trickle in before all was said and done. We ultimately concluded our campaign with a grand total of £762,711 raised from 359 investors!

All of this could not have been achieved without the tireless efforts of our staff here at Crunch, who have gone above and beyond to support Darren and the company at large in achieving this incredible result. We’d like to thank them all for their dedication and support over the course of this campaign.

What comes next?

You’ve done your bit - now, it’s our turn.

Every single penny of this amazing investment will be poured back into the software and service Crunch are famous for. We have a number of exciting upgrade plans scheduled in 2022, which we can’t wait to discuss in more detail with you in the new year.

We’ll be investing our new funds into more than just the software, however: we’ll spend 2022 building out our teams here at Crunch, expanding and strengthening our team to not only offer greater levels of support to our 11,000 clients, but also to implement the ambitious growth plans that will take Crunch to the next level.

We’ll be dedicating ourselves to turning our market-leading software and service solution into a world-leading one, continuing to push the envelope in new and innovative ways, and simplifying self-employment for even more small business owners in the UK.

Thank you once again for your support during our crowdfunding campaign. We won’t let you down.