Tendr Is Tinder For Finding Your Next Equity Crowdfunding Investment

Q: What do you get when you combine the swipe-to-like mechanism, popularized by dating app Tinder, with a wealth of potential equity crowdfunding investment opportunities?

A: an aggregator-sorter app called Tendr, that’s launched in the U.K. today (on iOS andAndroid) — promising to apply Tinderish thumb grease to equity crowdfunding investment campaigns to widen the deal flow funnel.

The aggregator app pulls in campaign content from multiple equity crowdfunding platforms at launch, including Crowdcube, Seedrs, Angel List U.K., Angels Den, Crowdfunder, Funding Tree and Investing Zone, letting investors maximize their exposure to businesses they might want to back within a single interface, while also applying an addictive, Tinder-style snap-decision sorting mechanism.

Tendr is really just a way of starring an investment opportunity that looks interesting for proper perusal later. So whether it ends up saving time or maximizing deal flow efficiency is up for debate. But it does offer a tweakable one-stop-shop for scanning multiple (U.K.) equity crowdfunding investment opportunities.

“Tendr removes friction, thereby increasing efficiency in deal sourcing,” argues founder Lex Deak, who is also the founder of global super angels investment club QVentures. “It is a useful tool for investors who are currently having to access up to a dozen platforms individually, it is also a nice lightweight channel for entrepreneurs and the wider start-up ecosystem for staying abreast of trends and what’s hot.

“As we grow we’ll be able to offer unsurpassed insight into how groups invest together and which deals are most popular. In the near future it will be the norm to invest in unlisted equities and alternative investments from your smartphone.”

Investors wanting to put money into a business they’ve found via Tendr are redirected to the relevant platform. The app doesn’t currently have a business model of its own, but if usage scales Deak says it will be looking to take a cut of any transactions it generates. He says development thus far has primarily been bootstrapped by the management team.

“As our numbers grow and we include a wider variety of alternative instruments, such as loans and property deals, we will charge a small percentage on transactions,” he says. “We’re working on including tailored content for users in relation to their investment preferences which may open up an additional stream. Lastly we are collecting insightful data on the alternative finance sector, we will always make the majority of this data freely available but there may be a case for a cost for bespoke reports in the future.”

Initially Tendr is U.K. only but the plan is to open it up to Europe and further afield, later this year. The first version of the app offers only minimal filters so users can select which platforms they’d like to see deals from and customize how often they’d like to be notified of new deals. Deak says the next version of the app will includes more advanced notifications so users can get a push notification when a liked deal reaches a certain percentage of funding.

Comments

The EHang 184 Is A Human-Sized Drone Taking Off At CES

We’ve seen some pretty cool stuff on day 1 of CES 2016, but probably nothing more eye-catching than the EHang 184, a human-sized drone built by the Chinese UAV company EHang . Yes you heard right — a giant autonomous drone that fits a human. It’s basically what you would expect to see if someone shrunk you down to the size of a LEGO and stuck you next to a DJI Inspire. Except no one was shrunk, and the giant flying machine was sitting smack in the middle of the CES drone section. EHang, which was founded in 2014 and has raised about $50M in venture fundingto date, was pretty gung-ho about telling everyone at CES that the 184 was the future of personal transport. And for the most part, people were too in awe to question them. But the reality is that the company probably was using the 184 as more of a marketing tool for their standard-sized drones like the Ghost . Not that we’re saying that the 184 will never be a real thing, just that it probably isn’t co...

Western Union Brings Money Transfer And Its Tricky Fees To Chat Apps

Remittance has always been a shady business. Migrant workers need to send money they earn home to their families, but get hit with fine print fees so less cash comes out the other side than they might assume. Remittance companies earn extra by keeping the margin between their own made up exchange rate and the real one. Western Union is the best known remittance company, with 500,000 brick-and-mortar locations around the world. But tech startups like TransferWise, Azimo, and WorldRemit are gunning for the business. They hope to increase convenience and reduce fees to lure customers away from Western Union, Moneygram, and other old-school remittance providers. So Western Union is going digital thanks to partnerships with big messaging apps. It launched its Western Union Connect system in October last year, followed by a partnership with WeChat for sending up to $100. Now it’s getting into bed with Viber , which has over 664 million “unique” users, thou...

Following Patent Deal, Every Time Apple Sells An iPhone, Ericsson Gets A Bit Of Money

Telecommunications infrastructure company Ericsson just announced that it has reached an agreement with Apple over an ongoing patent dispute. For the next seven years, Apple will pay a fraction of its iPhone and iPad profit to Ericsson in royalties. Back in February, Ericsson filed suits in many different jurisdictions for patent infringement (the International Trade Commission, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, as well as courts in the U.K., Germany and the Netherlands). According to the Swedish company, Apple has been violating 41 patents over the past few years with its iPhone and iPad, in particular patents related to GSM, UMTS and LTE technologies. As expected, the two companies have reached an agreement and Ericsson is dropping all of its lawsuits. Today’s news isn’t particularly surprising as Ericsson holds more than 35,000 patents. Many of them are related to wireles...

Google Calls Out EFF Over Bogus Claims That It Snoops On Students With Its Chromebooks

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) caused quite a stir this week when it alleged that Google is using its Chromebook platform, which has made a significant impact in the education sector, to snoop on students. The charges were damning, with the EFF claiming that Google was violating its own corporate policies and using students’ personally identifiable browsing data/habits to refine its services, in addition to sharing that data with partners. "EFF bases this petition on evidence that Google is engaged in collecting, maintaining, using, and sharing student personal information in violation of the 'K-12 School Service Provider Pledge to Safeguard Student Privacy' (Student Privacy Pledge), of which it is a signatory,” alleged the EFF in its initial FTC complaint. Google takes such allegations very seriously, and has thus responded to every claim brought forth by the EFF. “While we appreciate the EFF’s focus on student data privacy, we are confid...

NVBOTS Wants To Make 3D Printers As Easy As Toasters

Right now 3D printing curriculums, if they exist, are fairly sparse. Putting a two thousand dollar machine in front of a grade schooler usually ends up in a lot of 3D printed Yoda heads and not much education while the learning curve for most 3D design tools is steep. That’s what the founders of NVBOTS, AJ Perez, Forrest Pieper, Christopher Haid, and Mateo Peña Doll, are looking to solve. Their product, the NVPRO , is a 3D printer with a few interesting features. The two most interesting are the automatic removal system which pops parts off of the build plate when they are done and a built-in print server that allows you to print from any device. This means you can run large batches of prints from different users with each part popping off as its printed. This means a class of students can send jobs to a printer and then pick them up just as they would a laser printer. The printer also supports a central “admin” who can check jobs before they are printed as and offers a ...

Exciting Technology

Search This Blog