2018 Irish Enterprise Award

44 EU BUSINESS NEWS / 2018 Irish Enterprise Awards , Best Crowd-Funding Platform: SEEDUPS™ SeedUps is an innovative crowd-funding platform for tech start-ups that uses a range of applications tomatch great business ideas and start-ups with a pool of sophisticated high net worth investors. We invited Commercial Director SeanHickey to tell us more. Founded in 2011 with a view to help bring crowdfunding opportunities to the Irish Market, today SeedUps works to enable entrepreneurs to secure funding for start-up businesses faster, as well as offering investors access to a wide range of early stage projects to review follow and invest in. Sean provides us with an insight into the firm’s work and the secrets behind its success. “Here at SeedUps, we have developed an innovative platform which, through the benefit of our own technology, allows for a fair valuation to be determined for each investment. Some of our clients include Smart Catch, a socially conscious company focused on creating efficiencies and reducing waste in the seafood industry. We also work with CrackingCam, an application for mobile devices for social navigation which allows users to monitor bars, clubs or private parties within a target geography in real time to better plan their social activity. “This innovative technology has unique capabilities that will compel both the investor and the issuer, with low friction and free sign up for investors and companies. Our scalable and private founder-investor dialogue harnesses the thoughts of registered investors, considering the same project. Our crowd-driven pricing provides a breakthrough approach in dynamic company valuation, making it the fairest for the investor and the issuer. All of these benefits ensure excellence for our clients and differentiate us from our competitors in the burgeoning crowd-funding market.” As he looks to the future, Sean is optimistic about SeedUps ongoing success as he outlines how it will continue to adapt around the developments it is seeing in this constantly evolving marketplace. “Ultimately, this is an exciting time for crowdfunding in the global marketplace. SeedUps has already been engaging with clients in the United States to potentially provide our quality platform to a wider market. We believe that the industry will continue to grow as it is inherently needed to fill a market requirement. As we move forward within a potentially more regulated environment for Crowdfunding, it will be important to continue to offer the highest calibre of product that allows both investors and entrepreneurs to best match off their needs. There are undoubtedly challenges ahead, with Brexit potentially impacting not only the physical border locations but also how for example this will impact on currency exchange rates for exporting businesses: a large part of whom will be crowdfunding to enable business expansion into new markets. “Overall, at SeedUps we must continue to look at these challenges to see where they may also create opportunities for Irish businesses. This is a huge marketplace globally and we have an opportunity to be at the centre of this moving forward.” GBA17007 Contact Details Company: SeedUps Contact: Sean Hickey Address: Unit 1, Devlin’s Complex, Bridgend, County Donegal, Ireland Website: www.seedups.com