Only a fraction of companies seeking investor capital will get on the Crowdberry platform

Investing in companies and real estate brings both profit and risk. That's why Crowdberry carefully selects investment opportunities on our platform that you're guaranteed not to find elsewhere. Why doesn't everyone make the list? What do we look for when evaluating companies and how do we design each investment opportunity?

Not everyone passes through the sieve

Crowdberry represents dozens of invested-in companies, but the number that have gone through the vetting procedure is significantly higher. Companies that appear on our platform have to go through thorough due diligence. This process involves detailed analysis, from financial statements to the company's market position and future plans. Only companies that pass through the sieve make it to the public investment offering. And we do all this to make sure your investment is as safe as possible.

What are we noticing and checking?

• Who's behind the company: We explore the founders, the management and their business history, including their experiences, milestones achieved, and challenges they have faced and how they managed to overcome them.
• Economic segment: We look at the area in which the company does business, how the market works, who its customers and competitors are, and what the demand is for its products or services. We find out if and how the company is unique and what its potential is for the future.
• Plan for the future: We are interested in how the company wants to grow. We review its goals and business plan. For example, is it planning to expand abroad or expand its service portfolio? Is this plan realistic? Does the company have the means to do so? And if so, what are they?
• Financial health: We examine income statements and analyze why a company has gone through successful or challenging periods and how an investment could help it continue to grow. Alternatively, we suggest solutions to optimize the business to make it even more profitable and deliver the expected value to investors in the form of returns.
• Valuations: The valuation of a company is the basis of how we can define the expected return for investors. Every company has a current value, but the future value, which naturally increases as investors come in, is the basis for calculating the expected return.

The result is hundreds of hours of work by the investment team, reviewing every single detail so that investors can make the best possible decision and understand what the company is doing, what it wants to achieve and where it is going. That way we know exactly where your capital will go.

Did you know...?

When investing in co-ownership, as investors you should be mainly interested in where the company wants to go and how it wants to get there. Therefore, when analyzing companies that need growth capital, we look to the future. Conversely, when lending capital, investors should be interested in the companies’ success to date, how they have performed. To assess the riskiness of companies that are seeking loans from investors, we have our own scoring model that has been approved by the National Bank of Slovakia as part of our licensing process. Based on this, we determine the interest yield for investors.

Investment opportunities are approved by the Commission

To make sure that an investment opportunity has the right potential, an investment committee of professionals with both business and investment backgrounds vote on it before it is listed on the platform. Slovenská sporiteľňa, as a minority shareholder, has also taken its place on the committee. This step is to ensure that interesting and promising companies, which bring value not only to the economy but also to investors, compete for funding and capital from Slovaks.

We also cooperate with the ‘big players’

For many years, we have been working with leading firms that help us prepare investment campaigns to meet the highest standards, for example, in terms of governance – that is, the governance of the companies in which investors put their capital.

Slovenská sporiteľňa, as our large banking partner, has also placed great trust in us, thanks to which we will be able to provide even higher quality services and to further digitalize, thereby simplifying the entire investment process.

We have set the bar high

Management experience and credibility, financial health of the company, meaningful business plan and obvious future growth of the company, uniqueness of the product/service, sound market position, competition and positive development calculations: all of these must be met for a company to be listed on our site among the other investment opportunities. This is how we have collectively stood alongside the success of companies like GymBeam, Footshop, Noili Beauty, Isadore Apparel, Refresher and many others.