Startups

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KingsCrowd sees a future where the average investor’s portfolio may look more like 50/20/15/5/5/5 spanning public equities, fixed income, private real estate, startups, digital assets, and other alt assets

Per Chris:“As access expands and liquidity improves, alternative investments like startups will no longer be "alternative"; they’ll be mainstream and an essential part of a balanced portfolio.”"A quagmire of unstructured data"The growth in the startup investment market speaks for itself, with over 2,500startup investment opportunities emerging every year across 100+ platforms (!)Yet startup investing remains one of the most fragmented and blurry corners of the market.While public equities benefit from standardization, private startup markets remain stuck in a quagmire of unstructured data.

• Each platform presents deals in its own unique format
• There are wildly different data points & varying levels of disclosure
• There's no good way to compare opportunities side by side
• Lack of consistency makes it hard to perform due diligence

As the space continues to scale, the need for a centralized and trusted data layer — a place where investors, founders, and platforms can all operate from a trusted source of data and insights - is becoming increasingly important. That's where KingsCrowd comes in. They aggregate all this unstructured data, bringing clarity and intelligence to this fragmented space.

No more platform-hopping or spreadsheet hell — just one clean, consolidated view of the private investing landscape.

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KingsCrowd has three revenue streamsJust like a good portfolio, KingsCrowd’s business model has been carefully diversified across three key verticals. Retail investorsAggregation is just the beginning. KingsCrowd offers subscriptions to a suite of investing tools

• Startup due diligence research
• Comparisons
• Ratings
• Personalized portfolio management

FoundersBut unlike Bloomberg, KingsCrowd also serves startup founders as well.In fact, KingsCrowd offers a full suite of advisory services that span the entire fundraising lifecycle. 

• Form & legal filings
• Investor relations tools 
• Benchmarking
• Deal structuring guidance
• Compliance support

Chris knows that founders have all sorts of questions about valuation, pricing shares, dealing with investors, minimum and maximum investment, pricing, security types...all sorts of questions.But when they ask their lawyers for advice, they hear “We have no idea. We're not in the market. We just help you create the formal filing.”  Listen to Chris explain how they fill this gap​
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With their new acquisitions, KingsCrowd sits between startup founders and the crowdfunding marketplaces. This helps startups raise smarter, faster, and with more credibility.

Institutional investorsFinally, KingsCrowd's API infrastructure delivers its proprietary data to a growing list of institutional partners — including everything from the SEC to university endowment funds. This isn’t just a tool for individuals — it’s becoming a core data layer for the next generation of private capital markets.

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Each revenue stream reinforces the other, creating a flywheel of data, insights, and relationships that deepen KingsCrowd’s defensive moat.

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Data sources and AIThe real challenge with aI isn’t building the models, it’s feeding them with the right data. On that front, KingsCrowd brings together 300+ unique data points for every company they track, including:

• SEC filings
• Funding platforms
• APIs from third-party databases
• Proprietary historical performance data
• Real-time sentiment: bullish/bearish ratings from the KingsCrowd community

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This powerful flywheel of structured data gives agencies, financial institutions, and forward-thinking investors a serious edge, which they are willing to pay for. Strong traction & revenueWith 16,000 registered users and (more importantly) 2,000+ paying customers, KingsCrowd has proven strong product-market fit among retail investors.Chris claims platform has a low monthly churn (about 2% month-on-month, confirming the stickiness of their content. This foundation has helped the team grow to $700,000 of revenues in 2024.The company has 60% YoY revenue growth (cash-basis, non-audited), and 50% of revenues are now generated by B2B sales.But it's their acquisition strategy which is creating the most interesting growth opportunities.KingsCrowd is making smart acquisitionsKingsCrowd has now made three acquisitions: 

• ​Raisepapers (formerly called Lawcloud) — a platform to create, file, and manage capital raising docs.
• ​Lustro (formerly CrowdLustro) — an investor relations portal.
• And just this month they acquired CrowdCheck, one of the most highly respected names in advisory services for Reg CF and Regulation A+ crowdfunding offerings. 

Crowdcheck is Kingscrowd’s largest acquisition to date and adds over $3m in historical annual revenue to KingsCrowd’s top line, boosting projected 2025 revenue to $3.9 – $4.7m.CrowdCheck acquisition: A $4.5m non-dilutive transactionImportantly, the CrowdCheck deal has been structured in a non-dilutive manner, delivering immediate and long-term value to shareholders without issuing new equity. The deal structure has at its core a profit-sharing methodology:

• $500k paid upfront
• $4m Promissory Note to founder paid on a percentage of profits 

Per Chris:“We’re super excited to have completed this acquisition. Crowdcheck has an amazing reputation in the regulated crowdfunding marketplace...[they're] the go-to source of expertise in the space. 
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Their network and deal flow give us plenty of new opportunities to cross-sell from our suite of services. 
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It’s a win-win-win for both Crowdcheck, Kingscrowd, and our clients.” Combined, these acquisitions allow build a future where AI-driven tools streamline deal structuring, compliance, and capital raising. Listen to Chris explain the non-dilutive structure​Own a piece of KingsCrowd itselfReasonable valuationKingsCrowd's last fundraising was in April 2024. They raised $1.5m from 219 investors, at a valuation of 16c per share. Following the non-dilutive acquisition of Crowdcheck, KingsCrowd's market valuation is expected to rise healthily, paving the way for a higher valuation of $22–$25m. However, Kingscrowd has decided to raise $2.5m at their current $13.9m valuation ($0.18 per share). Use of fundsGoing forward, the bias of expansion will be towards sales & marketing:

• Growing sales team. A new director of sales has already been made — an ex-StartEngine professional that brings additional expertise. The next step is to support him with a second sales pro.
• A marketing agency will be activated to start scaling spend as the team team consolidates in the wake of acquisitions
• R&D will be activated to better tech-enable the new advisory business (for example, to write drafts of Form Cs and 1-As with AI trained on our data sets)
• Product enhancements, including an Investor Relations platform
• Further acquisition capital to support new opportunities that may arise

 Listen to Chris explain the use of funds​Key risks Data source riskKingsCrowd relies heavily on external data sources — it's at the core of Kingscrowd’s value proposition and revenue generation. Therefore, one of the largest risks would be losing access to some of this data.Now, Kingscrowd reviews 300+ data points per transaction from 100+ different sources. So there is already considerable diversification of data sources, and no "single point of failure."Acquisition integration risk When companies make acquisitions, there is always a risk that the integrations don't go smoothly.Their recent CrowdCheck acquisition is a big one. But the fact that Chris structured the deal in a non-dilutive way ensures the company doesn't get in over its head.Competitive riskI'm actually surprised how little notable competition KingsCrowd seems to have.In discussions Chris, here has been a lot of competition over the years that have sort of come and gone. (Angels & Entrepreneurs, Crowditz, and Newchip, to name a few.)The company is aware of Crowdfund Capital Advisors and Hubtas, but their presence is not significantly felt at this stage. Per Chris:“In the future, competitors could be the Bloomberg or Morningstars, but I don’t worry much about the big guys. I worry more about the college kid thinking about building in this market. The big guys will just buy us!”