This Berlin Startup is Disrupting Traditional VC Funding Through Tokenised Equity

Traditional venture capital (VC) funding is often plagued with long and complicated processes, making it difficult for company founders to connect with investors.

For one company, that is creating the world’s first decentralised stock exchange in conjunction with Binance and the Malta Stock Exchange, it doesn’t have to be that way.

“Opening Creativity for Good”

Berlin-based Neufund is an Ethereum-based protocol for securities’ tokenisation and issuance. It allows any type of financial asset to be tokenised and liquidised. It’s also aiming to bring disruption to the traditional VC markets.

Speaking to NewsBTC, Zoe Adamovicz, CEO and co-founder of Neufund, knows firsthand how hard it is to find and close investments. As an experienced entrepreneur and angel investor, Adamovicz decided to found Neufund with fellow founder and CTO, Marcin Rudolf, to allow startups, small and medium-sized businesses, and established companies to legally issue a new concept of asset ownership: tokenised equity.

Under German jurisdiction, the platform provides organisations with a legal and technical framework to conduct fully legal and safe equity token offerings (ETOs). Disrupting traditional VC funding, Neufund is doing things faster, easier, and bringing the necessary liquidity needed.

“We are a team of regulatory and blockchain experts, on a mission to change the way projects are funded,” Adamovicz said. “Our ultimate goal is to open creativity for good. We want to empower people all around the world, making it possible for them to pursue their projects and dreams.”

Neufund has announced the first six companies that will be conducting their ETOs with them: Brille24, an eyewear pioneer, Uniti, a Swedish electric car startup, Next Big Thing, a startup incubator for the Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchain ventures, mySwooop, an omni-channel re-commerce platform that buys and sells new and used electronics, Blockstate, a company creating products for the future of finance, and Emflux Motors, an electric superbike company.

It is these ETOs that are looked at as offering a new era of legal and secure ICOs. According to Neufund, equity tokens, serving as equity instruments, empower those with limited investing capital to use fractional ownership as a means of investing.

According to Adamovicz, a form of universal token that is able to represent real-world business will replace utility tokens as investment instruments. She believes it is only then that “the investor’s and issuer’s incentives can be aligned and economic models can be mathematically consistent.”

She adds that ordinary shares will be replaced with some form of programmable shares or technologically enhanced shares. Consequently, she believes that “security tokens will replace both the shares used in today’s financial world, and the utility tokens used in ICOs.”

Creating the First Decentralised Stock Exchange

Earlier this month, the equity fundraising platform announced that it was collaborating with MSX, an innovation vehicle of the Malta Stock Exchange, and Binance, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges.

The aim is to create a regulated and decentralised global stock exchange for listing and trading tokenised securities alongside of crypto assets. With market equity tokens projected to reach $1 trillion by 2020, the partnerships will make it possible for companies to trade their equity in a legally-binding way on the biggest crypto exchange in the world, said Adamovicz. She adds that liquidity is one of the major values of equity tokens versus traditional investment assets.

“We aim to bring access to [an] international community of investors gathered around Binance, and thanks to MSE all trades will be secured with proper licenses,” she said.

Featured image from Zoe Adamovicz.