Venture capital from small investors: The first crowdinvesting projects in Germany were launched in August 2011. The platform crowdinvest.de has now examined the current performance of this new investment vehicle. The results are positive.
377 crowdinvesting rounds with a volume of 125.6 million euros were successfully completed in Germany over the past five years. The "Crowdinvest success monitor" analyzes the status, return, and default risk of the investment rounds. However, the results should be viewed with caution: At 84.3%, the vast majority of the invested capital is still active, meaning it has neither defaulted nor been fully repaid or repurchased.
The overall default rate is surprisingly low: around one in twenty (4.91 million euros) invested is lost. As expected, startups lead in both the default rate and return: 9.71 million of the capital was burned, with an average return of 27.41 million euros. Roughly every second crowd-invested euro went to a startup. Real estate follows in second place in terms of investment volume: The 46.9 million euros raised in 49 investment rounds achieved an average return of 5.91 million euros. None of the projects failed.
Analysis draws positive conclusions for crowdinvesting
Investment volumes in the other segments were significantly lower. The respective figures are correspondingly less meaningful: Only €2.6 million was invested in the broad SME segment. Two-thirds of the capital invested in films flowed into the Stromberg film. Since this film generated significant revenue, the average return is correspondingly high.
Even though the study authors repeatedly point out the limited significance of their results and reject hasty conclusions, the interim assessment for the often criticized crowd investing reads positively.
Also the Next IHK Crowdfunding Night on 26 September at WERK1 deals with the topic of crowd investing.
