Joseph Kelly Thinking out loud

Seed Capital Funding

At the moment we at Loopthing are trying to source capital for our seed funding round. We always anticipated this would be hard, and our expectation has been correct.

The avenues we have chosen to source this investment from include - Business Angel Partnership, Enterprise Ireland Growth Capital, and most recently cmypitch.com. As of yet no concrete interest has been received from BAP and EI, so last week we targeted the latter to access alternative Irish and UK investors.

The Loopthing project itself is just about to turn into revenues based on the OpenScore application, and we as of yet have not introduced any advertising to the network. With the corner being turned on monetisation and new developments on the horizon we would consider the project a very attractive investment.

So what are the potential barriers?

Given the innovative business model, investors may find it difficult to invest until a proven revenue stream is generated. If that's the case then it's a bootstrap, prioritise and monetise scenario. Unfortunate given the growth opportunity, but necessary to succeed.

Although Ireland has become a very wealthy country, I believe the vast majority of our investment strategies are still quite traditional. Our vast obsession with property ownership being one of these key traits, and this is not just based on risk aversion as we have recently learnt.  This is starting to change, but the current economic environment has placed temporary restrictions on funding opportunities. However new funding routes are being developed for the funding gap with find ourselves in.

The upside is that no matter what environment you find yourself in, there will always be funding available for good projects. So we must continue to work hard and advance our product offering to ensure we are classified as such going forward.