French startup Round table has raised a $3.2 million (€3 million) funding round from 100 business angels. That’s quite a large pool of individual investors, but that’s because Roundtable runs an angel investment platform for European startups. Supported by eFoundersthe company takes care of the administrative, legal and financial processes involved in start-up investments.
Roundtable is not the first investment platform to focus on startup investments. In particular, AngelList has popularized the concept of group investing AngelList Syndicates. Essentially, an angel investor brings an investment opportunity to the platform and other angels can follow the lead angel on a deal-by-deal basis.
AngelList isn’t the only company facilitating startup investment. For example, in the UK, Seeders And Odin also manage fundraising deals for startups.
Roundtable focuses specifically on European startups and works especially well for startups in France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. When investors want to buy shares in a startup, Roundtable sets up a special purpose vehicle (SPV) in France or Luxembourg. The sting in charge of the SPV may decide to allocate a portion of other investors’ passive interest to the vehicle.
The platform currently cost 1% of the amount collected by the vehicle with a minimum of €5,000 and a maximum of €15,000. There are also some costs associated with secondary sales. So far, the company’s first few months have gone pretty well, as Roundtable has already completed more than 100 deals. It represents €50 million in assets under administration.
Due to the social features of the platform, influential angels bring deals and leverage their networks to increase the amounts raised. Some of the most active angels on the platform are Roxanne Varza who created a community of female business angels, Pieter-Jan Bouten in the Belgian tech ecosystem, Christopher Zemina in the Germany/Austria region, Aircall co-founder Olivier Pailhes in Spain, Paul Le, etc.
Many of these angels invested in Roundtable itself. And there’s already been an exit for a Roundtable investment: Space Tug Startup Launcher was acquired by Vast (see businessroundups.org’s coverage of the deal).
All in all, this is not the biggest round of funding of the year. But I’m sure Roundtable will show up more and more in investment talks in the future.
Image Credits: Round table
