London, UK, April 26, 2010 -- As evidence that start-ups can still attract investment despite the economic downturn, UK investment website Stockopedia announced earlier today that it had secured over $700,000 in Seed Funding from a consortium of private City individuals.
Founded in 2007, Stockopedia is the UK's only online financial media platform that combines social media tools with professional level research capabilities. Its founders, Edward Croft and David Brickell, both from banking backgrounds, felt that most financial websites were giving scant coverage to smaller and mid-cap companies - the 'long tail' of the stock market. "The City has increasingly prioritised scale in search of ever increasing profitability, which means they no longer cover thousands of smaller listed companies effectively, if at all," says CEO Croft. "Our solution is to improve the visibility of those companies though a collaborative, social media-based approach whereby we gather financial commentary from established smaller publishers, bloggers, research companies and newsletter writers, and fill in the gaps with our own news coverage." There are over 2500 companies listed on the London market, of which more than half have a market capitalisation under £25m.
Given the rapidly growing population of over 1 million online investors in the UK, Croft and Brickell decided to develop a website which would provide these investors with the tools, information and connectivity they need to make better investment decisions. According to Croft, "the credit crunch has left many people disillusioned with traditional financial services. There is a real appetite for information as more people choose to take matters into their own hands. Rather than spamming users with irrelevant offers the way that many financial sites seem to, our goal has been to provide investors with personalised tools, data and information that is relevant to their interests" As just one example, Stockopedia recently launched the Stockopedia Stream. Similar to Twitter, the idea is to provide users with a highly personalised feed of news and information reflecting only the companies, investing topics and authors that they want to read about. Croft notes, "the reception so far from our users to this approach has been excellent".
To develop its offer, Stockopedia recently decided to raise external capital and turned to private backers given the dire state of the UK venture capital industry. "In 2009, venture capital took a 35% hit in the amount of new capital raised," explains Croft. "We weren't impressed with the terms being offered…
