New York, NY (PRWEB) January 10, 2014
Crowdability – the first independent research firm focused solely on the emerging $300 billion equity crowdfunding market – has just released its first “Investor Insights” report.
The study tracked the behavior of Crowdability’s subscriber base, predominantly comprised of retail investors, for the 4th Quarter of 2013.
Investors showed a strong interest in the transportation sector.
“3 of the 10 most popular deals on our platform involved urban transportation,” says Crowdability co-founder, Wayne Mulligan. “The interest coincided with consumer excitement around Uber, and their massive round of financing.”
Mulligan is referring to the $3.5 billion valuation Uber received as it raised a $258 million round of financing this past August.
“Popularity” is measured by users’ click behavior from Crowdability’s website and weekly “aggregated deals” emails the company sends subscribers. Crowdability aggregates and curates equity crowdfunding deals from around the web and delivers them to subscribers’ inboxes once per week, allowing for easy screening across multiple sites.
“In addition to high user interest in Transportation companies, we also saw a strong demand for ‘fund-like’ products,” noted Crowdability co-Founder, Matthew Milner.
“Our most popular deal was the “Instant Portfolio” from the WeFunder platform, which gives users the ability to invest in a dozen Y Combinator and MIT startups with one click,” says Milner. “And a whitepaper we published, ‘Mutual Fund for Startups.’ has been our most downloaded report thus far.”
According to Milner, more than 1,100 copies of the report were downloaded in less than 24 hours.
Although equity crowdfunding is still in its earliest phases, Crowdability believes this data points to an important trend. As individual investors – many of whom have never invested in a private company before – step into this space, they’ll be looking for ways to reduce risk, and will rely on 3rd parties for help with investment decision making. This is similar to how investors currently operate and invest in public-market assets such as ETFs and Mutual Funds.
Over time, Crowdability plans to add additional data services such as ratings and rankings of various deals based on investor sentiment, momentum and quality.
Crowdability is privately held and does not maintain a relationship with the platforms or any of the companies it features. The firm is focused on providing information, data and analysis that is 100% independent and unbiased.