Crowd investors make 19x returns on Revolut investments

Crowd investors who backed Revolut, Britain’s first digital banking unicorn via Crowdcube, have now realised returns of ~19x on their original investments.

You may have seen Revolut on the platform in July 2016, where the crowd got to invest as little as £10 or as much as £5,000. In April this year, Revolut received a $250m investment led by DST Global, setting a valuation for the company of ~£1.2 billion, making it one of the first crowdfunded unicorns.

Following that investment, crowd investors were offered the opportunity to either sell their shares back to Revolut, or retain them. Those who chose to sell have now received payment into their bank accounts, while those who have stayed invested in the company continue to own a part of one of the world’s leading fintech companies.

Revolut originally raised £1.01m from crowd investors via Crowdcube in July 2016, only a year after the company was founded, and at the same time as Balderton Capital and Index Ventures, the leading venture capital firms, made investments. At that point the company was valued at ~£42m.

Revolut is the second business to join the ranks of Crowdcube’s ‘Unicorn Club’ of companies valued over $1bn, after BrewDog achieved unicorn status in April 2017. The fintech firm is targeting continued growth for shareholders, by, for instance, bringing new products to market across Europe such as cryptocurrency trading via its app.

Nikolay Storonsky, co-founder of Revolut, said: "Consumers tend to have distant relationships with their banks, but we wanted to create a community around the Revolut brand by letting our customers invest and financially benefit as we grew. Financial gains should not be exclusive to banks, but also to the people which help them grow and succeed."

This is a huge moment for the finance sector - and for Crowdcube, which was built to give anyone the chance to invest in the next big thing. Crowd investors backed Revolut very early in the company’s life, alongside leading venture capital firms, just two years ago. Now Revolut’s valuation has soared from £42m to over £1.2 billion and those crowd investors, who put in anything from £10 to £5000 via Crowdcube’s platform, have made profits of roughly 1,900% on their initial stakes and many have now put the money into their bank accounts. Crowdcube has made it possible for the man or woman in the street to invest in a unicorn and bank real cash profits at a level only experienced before by the closed world of venture capital firms

Jeremy Steinson of Patronus Partners, a London-based investment management firm, bought the maximum £5,000 allocation of Revolut shares when they raised funds on Crowdcube in July 2016. This month he sold a sixth of his allocation, at a 19x multiple, following the secondary market created after DST invested in Revolut in April. He lives in Suffolk and is 32. He said: "This was my third or fourth investment using the Crowdcube platform. My work often involves foreign exchange so knew that the consumer market was ready for disruption and I already had a Revolut card and liked their model, so I put in for the maximum allocation of shares when they raised on Crowdcube two years ago. I generally invest in listed equities but investing via Crowdcube was simple to do and I'm obviously very pleased with a 19x return that I've now part realised. I've sold about a sixth of my allocation and I'm retaining the rest of my investment in Revolut, who seem to continue to have a phenomenal growth rate of customers and hopefully look set for more disruption within other areas."