1. New paths in fundraising
Imagine you’ve opened a specialty coffee roastery with an attached café in the heart of Munich. After a long preparation period, you finally opened and welcomed your first guests. At a regional gastro event, you meet a couple of food bloggers and coffee lovers who spontaneously want to invest to expand your product range and support your marketing. Instead of waiting for months for the next financing round and attending expensive notary appointments, you can close investments immediately with Tokenize.it.
2. Digital profit participation rights: How the model works
The platform is based on the established concept of profit participation rights and brings them into the digital world. The key advantage: As a startup or small business, you can grant economic participations without
- requiring a notary visit,
- investors appearing in the commercial register,
- high minimum investments being required.
The process is handled via the Ethereum blockchain. This means each digital profit participation right is represented there as a token, without you or your investors needing in-depth blockchain knowledge. All relevant processes – from sign-up to payment by bank transfer – are completed online in just a few minutes.
3. Continuous fundraising: Private vs. public fundraising
With Tokenize.it, you can design your fundraising flexibly not only in terms of timing, but also in terms of investor outreach. Private fundraising allows you to send a digital offer to up to 149 potential supporters without publishing an official prospectus. This limit applies regardless of the respective investment amount. Once you reach or exceed this limit, you can seamlessly transition the fundraising to a public offer. This allows you to raise up to eight million euros in twelve months from an unlimited number of investors. Marketing measures – for example, targeted social media campaigns or newsletters that lead directly to the offer – are then permitted.
4. Employee participation and loyalty programs
In addition, employee participation programs using Tokenize.it’s profit participation rights are also possible. Just as with the previously common ESOP/VSOP methods, cliffs and vesting periods can be structured with profit participation rights to bind employees to your company long-term. There are also no tax disadvantages – if anything, profit participation rights as virtual shares have significant tax advantages over VSOP. Ultimately, the function of employee participation is nothing more than the issuance of profit participation rights as GmbH tokens, without the startup receiving money in return. Thus, this function can also be used for granting participations to loyal customers or as part of loyalty programs. A concrete example: the 10 customers who spent the most money on your coffee over an entire year receive a small stake in the form of digital profit participation rights in your company at the end of the year.
Conclusion
Whether unexpectedly interested coffee lovers at an event or strategic investors who want to participate in your roastery long-term: With Tokenize.it, you always have your fundraising under control. Digital profit participation rights eliminate time-consuming notary appointments, require no high minimum amounts, and allow lightning-fast investments. In an increasingly digital business world, you create a stable and forward-looking foundation to continue expanding your operation.
Do you want to learn more about Tokenize.it and get to know the team in person? Meet us on February 13, 2025 for the launch of our Foundacious event series. With our partners CMS, Google Cloud, and CANS, we’ll spend an evening discussing concrete benefits for founders. Joining us is Nina Killes from The People Branding Company, who will share her knowledge about LinkedIn and personal branding in her presentation. Register here.
