Meet Our Team

Congratulations to coffee delivery service GOffee on becoming the latest $1M raise on StartEngine! Thank you to the 2,338 investors who participated in GOffee’s funding round and helped GOffee’s Founder & CEO Vincent Meyer achieve his dreams.

We work hard to bring a wide variety of offerings to our community, and we are thrilled to say that GOffee is the first company in the Food & Beverage industry to raise $1M+ on StartEngine! We wish Vincent success as he grows his business in the coming months using the funds GOffee raised on our platform.

If you missed our recent webinar with StartEngine’s CEO & Co-Founder Howard Marks talking about StartEngine Primary LLC, our wholly-owned broker-dealer subsidiary, you can watch the video of that webinar here:

In the webinar, Howard discusses what StartEngine Primary means for the future of StartEngine as well as the company’s growth so far. Howard also answers questions from StartEngine’s shareholders at the end.

Apologies for the sound quality in the beginning! We were experiencing technical difficulties that we resolved around the 17:50 minute mark.

Thank you to the 1,791 investors who have participated in our raise and helped us reach this milestone! Without you, we would not be able to help other entrepreneurs like us raise capital and achieve their dreams too.

We are grateful for your support and are excited to have you join us in our mission to democratize private capital markets and create more opportunities for small business and everyday investors alike. Together, we will change the landscape of startup investing forever.

Our broker-dealer StartEngine Primary LLC is now registered in all 50 states and Washington DC. It took 3 months of work from the time that we established StartEngine Primary, and on average, the process of state registration usually takes 6 months! Now that work is done, and companies raising capital through StartEngine Primary can accept investors from all 50 states, which is a critical part of StartEngine’s company mission to help entrepreneurs achieve their dreams.

As we continue to democratize how private capital works and transform the way startups find funding, we are excited about this latest milestone and sign of growth that points to a brighter future for small business and retail investors everywhere.

Note: StartEngine’s own raise is conducted by StartEngine Crowdfunding Inc. and not StartEngine Primary LLC. Unfortunately, this means that we still cannot accept investments from Florida, Arizona, or Nebraska.

You may have already noticed a change on our website over the past few months: we've given our new campaign pages a makeover. Now our page has one too! As we work to improve your experience on StartEngine, we have released a new campaign page layout to more clearly present information to you.

At the top of our campaign page, you can now see the new Investor Snapshot. On the top right of the snapshot, you can now easily find the details of the investment, such as:

• The amount raised, the terms of the offering, how many days are left to invest, and whether the offering is eligible for the StartEngine Owner's Bonus (which you won't see on this page since this is where investors can earn that bonus in the first place)

At the bottom of the snapshot, you can see:

• Company highlights, which give investors the key reasons to invest

Below the campaign video, you can also find:

• A link to the company's website, their location, the regulation they are raising capital under, their industry, and a brief overview of the business

We hope you like the new design as well as our new page. You will be seeing a lot more of the Investor Snapshot with new launches on our platform!

Like what we’re doing at StartEngine? Then join us! We are growing rapidly, and to meet the increasing interest in equity crowdfunding and our platform, we are expanding the StartEngine team. We are looking for smart, driven individuals to join StartEngine and help us transform the way other small businesses find funding.

We are hiring in marketing, compliance, software development, sales and more. You can learn more about working at StartEngine, as well as what positions we have available here: https://www.startengine.com/careers

We are excited to announce a huge milestone in StartEngine’s history. Hylete, the fitness apparel company, has filed their Form S-1 and applied to list their stock on the New York Stock Exchange. Hylete is the first company to have raised capital on StartEngine and gone on to file an S1, gearing up to go public on the NYSE.

Hylete raised $1M on StartEngine in the spring of 2017, and went on to acquire GRACEDBYGRIT, another apparel company that also raised capital on StartEngine.

Filing a Form S-1 is the first step towards listings shares on a national exchange. If all goes well, this opportunity may provide those who invested in Hylete on StartEngine an opportunity to sell the shares they purchased back in 2017 and see a return on their investment.

We are happy for Hylete and wish them the best as they enter the final stretches of preparing to go public. We also want to thank all of you, our StartEngine Owners, who were able to see the future of funding from the very beginning.

As you may have already heard, we’re excited to announce that StartEngine is now a broker-dealer! It took us 18 months of work, but we have finally established StartEngine Primary, a broker-dealer that is registered with the SEC and a member of FINRA.

This is very exciting news for us as our broker-dealer will allow StartEngine to provide additional services to companies raising capital under Regulation A on our platform.

Through StartEngine’s broker-dealer, we can

• Increase StartEngine’s revenue because we can now accept commissions for Regulation A offerings in exchange for the additional services we can provide through the broker-dealer.

• Help more companies raise capital under Regulation A. More business means more investment opportunities for our community.

Becoming a broker-dealer is StartEngine’s next step to disrupt a fundraising process that has historically been facilitated by traditional and well-funded financial and banking institutions. At StartEngine, we believe companies should be able to raise capital from main street investors, and anyone should be able to invest in ideas they believe in. This announcement represents the first of two big steps towards building our investor trading platform and our ultimate goal of becoming a marketplace for private investments.

To learn more about StartEngine Primary and what it means for the platform, please read this blog post. Thank you for being part of our community and coming on this journey with us.

Every month, our marketing team compiles and analyzes national data on all Regulation Crowdfunding offerings across every funding portal (not just StartEngine). From studying which industries have seen the most success with Regulation Crowdfunding, to the gender of the founders, to the county the company is based in, we report on it all in the StartEngine Index. We have collected data on every single Regulation Crowdfunding offering since it first started back on May 16, 2016. Trust us, there’s a lot of them. 1,698 to be exact.

For the month of June, we’re excited to say that StartEngine had 6 of the 10 largest active Regulation Crowdfunding raises in the country! It’s an achievement that speaks to the hard work that the StartEngine team has put in to build our crowdfunding platform, the size of our community, and our market momentum. In 2019, the average raise on StartEngine has increased 39% compared to the average raise in 2018.

 A big thank you to those that have invested in entrepreneurs on our platform and helped them achieve their dreams, and thank you also to those that have invested in StartEngine itself.

If you haven’t already, we invite you to invest in StartEngine and join us as we reshape the way startups get funding forever.

As part of the StartEngine community, you have the opportunity to read about and invest in all kinds of businesses raising capital on StartEngine. Hopefully, you've learned a bit about us in the process too.

You've probably heard about StartEngine's company mission before, which is to help entrepreneurs achieve their dreams, and it's something that we are proud of and talk about a lot. But how often do you get to hear from the founders themselves about the impact equity crowdfunding has had on them?

Watch the video below to hear entrepreneurs talk about the power of equity crowdfunding and building relationships with you, a new kind of investor.

Join us and support more entrepreneurs and small businesses like those in this video by investing in StartEngine. With your funding, you can help us grow, develop our platform and create more resources to help other startups grow too.

This week, we rolled out some changes to the StartEngine platform, and we wanted to share those updates here as well. First and foremost, we revamped the StartEngine Owner’s Bonus.

As of this week, we have changed the StartEngine Owner's Bonus in a significant way: for all upcoming campaigns, investors will be able to earn their 10% bonus on their investment when investing at any time during the course of all Reg CF campaigns. Previously, investors could only earn that 10% bonus when investing during the first 24 hours of companies that participated in the bonus program. Note: this change only applies to upcoming launches and does not apply to the companies that are currently live and already raising capital on StartEngine.

Secondly, we have also updated our platform to give investors with the Owner’s Bonus priority if they are waitlisted on a company that has surpassed its maximum funding goal. This means that they will have the first opportunity to invest should room in the offering become available, in the event of canceled or failed investments. Similarly, this change only applies to upcoming launches and does not apply to the companies that are already live and raising on StartEngine.

The third update we made to the platform is that you may now notice badges next to usernames in the comment section of campaign pages, which you can see in the example image below.

We have introduced three badges, and those are:

• “Invested,” which means that the user has invested in the company whose page they are commenting on

• “X Investments,” which signifies how many investments that user has made on StartEngine

• “SE Owner,” which means that the user is a StartEngine shareholder

We made these changes to improve both the experience on StartEngine’s platform as well as that of StartEngine’s shareholders. We hope you like them. If you aren’t a StartEngine investor already, we encourage you to look at our campaign, invest in us, and earn your bonus to take advantage of its new features, including earning a 10% bonus on your investment when investing at any point during a Reg CF campaign and receiving priority on the waitlist.

At the beginning of 2017, we had 65,000 users on the StartEngine platform. It took us two years of building and marketing the StartEngine platform to reach that point. Yesterday, on May 23th, StartEngine’s 200,000th user joined our community!

In the same amount of time it took us to get our first 65,000 users, we grew our community by 3x, bringing us to our community today, now 200,113 users and counting.

Over 4,000 members of the StartEngine community have chosen to invest in StartEngine, whether in our first Regulation A offering or our current raise here. As we celebrate this milestone, we invite you to invest in StartEngine too and become a StartEngine shareholder. Help us continue to build our platform as we work to reach 300,000 users, 500,000 users, then 1 million and beyond.

On the morning of May 8th, the StartEngine team, including co-founder & CEO Howard Marks, Chief Marketing Officer Johanna Cronin, and Vice Presidents of Sales & Business Development Josh Amster and Allen Jebsen, hosted a 2018 Earnings Call to discuss StartEngine’s audited 2018 financials and the future roadmap of the company with StartEngine’s shareholders.

The team discussed:

• StartEngine’s values and 10-year vision
• StartEngine’s increased revenue of $4,682,528 in 2018 from $2,046,948 in 2017, a total increase of 129%, and a break down of that revenue: in 2018, StartEngine earned $1.4M in both Premium revenue and platform fees, as well as $596K from events & sponsorships
• StartEngine’s increased cost of revenues of $2,637,961 in 2018 from $729,108 in 2017, a total of 262%, and a break down of those costs
• StartEngine’s decreased gross margin of 44% in 2018 from 64% in 2017
• StartEngine’s marketing strategy
• The company’s 1-year plan, which includes launching our broker-dealer and secondary trading platform, signing 170 companies, decreasing onboarding time, raising capital for StartEngine, and launching a 3rd sales team
• The company’s 3-year picture, which includes having 200,000 active investors on the platform, 100 employees, 10+ sales teams, a 10+ team devoted to Secondary, bicoastal expansion, and more

At the end of the presentation, the call opened up for a Q&A with StartEngine shareholders that attended the call. You can watch the call in its entirety here: 

Recently, PopCom closed a $1M Regulation Crowdfunding offering on StartEngine, and the story of PopCom's CEO Dawn Dickson encapsulates StartEngine's mission to help entrepreneurs achieve their dreams.

In just 122 days, Dickson raised $1.07M and even appeared on the Breakfast Club, a nationally syndicated radio show, on March 11 as her campaign caught the interest of the press. The remarkable thing about Dickson's raise is that she broke a significant barrier in funding. Dickson was one of the first 40 black women to raise $1M or more in the US when she raised her first $1M for PopCom in November 2017, and with this raise, she becomes the first black female founder to raise over $1M in a security token offering.

0.0006% of venture funding goes to black female founders, and this story serves as an example that equity crowdfunding can open the doors of funding to everyone.

Her raise is a win for PopCom, for funding equality and for proving that equity crowdfunding is a viable funding model for entrepreneurs everywhere. We are proud to support PopCom's growth, and we invite you to invest in StartEngine and help us become a bigger and better platform that can support more entrepreneurs like Dawn Dickson.

On April 12th, we hosted the StartEngine Founder’s Summit, an all-day event for entrepreneurs to learn how to use equity crowdfunding for their business. We had over 150 entrepreneurs attend the event, including 40 StartEngine customers! We are proud to say the day was a success. Check out some of the pictures from Founder’s Summit below:

This week, StartEngine co-founder & CEO Howard Marks did an interview on Cheddar to discuss the difficulties of raising capital and how StartEngine makes fundraising easier for entrepreneurs by providing them access to the crowd through equity crowdfunding.

In his words, “the difference with our platform and what you see elsewhere, like venture capitalists for example...is [that our platform] is open to everyone. You have a main street investor who is looking for an investment opportunity directly into a company, and we provide that.”

Touching on his background in the gaming industry with Activision and Acclaim, Howard said, “I look at the world of finance like a game business. I don’t look at it from a financial perspective where you have all of these hurdles…[and] regulation. I look at it as an opportunity to change how things work.”

Watch his conversation with Cheddar’s anchor Alyssa Julya Smith in full at this link: https://cheddar.com/media/startengine-ceo-on-how-platform-is-democratizing-access-to-capital

I am thrilled that our second Regulation A offering has been qualified by the SEC. Last year, we raised $5M from nearly 3,500 investors in our first Regulation A offering. In the first few weeks of this second campaign, we’ve seen a lot of momentum already, and we hope to have thousands of new investors join the ranks of StartEngine Owners.

In the last few weeks, we’ve had a few exciting developments at StartEngine:

1. We recently increased the maximum investment limit for credit cards to $10,000 on StartEngine’s platform, giving investors greater flexibility in how they invest in companies.

2. In March, StartEngine achieved a major funding milestone. Companies on our platform have now raised more than $90M to date through StartEngine.

At StartEngine, we feel grateful because we are able to help so many entrepreneurs achieve their dreams. It is the fuel we need to keep going. I just got off the phone with an entrepreneur who raised $1M with us recently. They were excited about their successful raise and kept talking about their new community of investors and the future plans for the company.

With this offering, we are continuing our popular StartEngine Owner’s Bonus program, in which those who invest at least $1,000 in StartEngine, or are investing in StartEngine for a second or third time, will receive for one year a 10% bonus in shares in all participating Regulation Crowdfunding offerings when investing during the first 24 hours of new campaigns.

As we continue our journey together, I hope you will consider making an investment in StartEngine.

Best,

Howard

Please see our offering circular for additional information.