Startup Investing

OurCrowd First: Bringing seed-stage investment to the OurCrowd investor community

OurCrowd is proud to announce the launch of its first fund, OurCrowd First, a specialized $10M global early stage fund focusing on seed and Pre-A startups. With the fund, OurCrowd will leverage its established infrastructure to bring equity crowdfunding to approximately 20+ seed-stage companies providing our investors even earlier access to promising opportunities. OurCrowd First is further democratizing the world of seed stage investment funds, since most other funds require million dollar minimum investments. “We are proud to be launching our entry into the funds market with the OurCrowd First seed fund. Our investors have asked for more access to earlier stage deals, which have been hard to do until now on OurCrowd, given the rapid growth of our platform and our average deal sizes of millions of dollars. OurCrowd First will cover the earliest stages of the startup funding journey providing up to $500,000 for a select group of companies.” —  Jon Medved, OurCrowd founder and CEO OurCrowd First will be managed by General Partners Eduardo Shoval and Yori Nelken, who both come with highly successful track records in early-stage...

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This week on OurCrowd’s QuickFire webinar: Mark One, Influitive, and ElMindA

Check it out: May was one of OurCrowd’s most active months to date for investment opportunities. As part of OurCrowd’s new QuickFire webinar series, we presented three of our latest investment opportunities — Mark One (lifestyle tech), Influitive (advocate marketing), and ElMindA (brain mapping) — in order to allow investors to get to know the companies, hear updates, and meet their platforms. View the webinar recording below or online here. QuickFire Webinar: A Chance to Meet 3 Companies in 1 Hour (6/3/15) The next QuickFire webinar will be held later this month, for information and updates on the time and date email us at webinar@ourcrowd.com. To find out more about these investment opportunities and others on our investment platform, click here. ——— [xyz-ihs...

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GE Ventures and OurCrowd: Breaking new ground in innovation finance

In the spirit of crowdbuilding, last month OurCrowd hosted a special visit by GE Senior executives from the U.S. at our Jerusalem offices. The event joined the GE team with our portfolio’s entrepreneurs to discuss ways to collaborate company growth. Partners since November 2013, GE is looking to contribute investment dollars as well as experience and expertise to OurCrowd investments. The partnership allows GE Ventures to co-invest alongside OurCrowd in companies that are focused on GE’s core industries of healthcare, software, energy and advanced manufacturing. Throughout the day, participants took part in various round table discussions, including: Key Decisions in Commercialization Strategy by Brett May – Head of Ventures and Business Development, GE Software How to Pitch Investors by David Mayhew, GE Ventures – Chief Risk Officer Impactful Branding & Communications for Startups by Andy Goldberg – GE Corporate Global Creative Director Importance of Strategic Partnerships by Karen Kerr – Senior Managing Director, Advanced Manufacturing Financial Planning & Reporting: Smart Cash Management by Dennis Cinelli – GE Ventures Chief Financial Officer Impactful Branding & Communications for Startups by Andy Goldberg –...

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Conquering the Term Sheet: Everything you need to know about deal terms (Part 3)

Yesterday, we held the 3rd installment of OurCrowd’s 3-part educational series on how professional investors analyze and construct terms and conditions for their investments. On this week’s Q&A session, we continue to explore the fundamentals of deal terms in startup investing, discussing how to: Understand the basics of deal terms, from full ratchet to anti-dilution Get an insider’s view of crafting deal terms in startup investing Learn what to look for in a term sheet from seed stage to pre-IPO ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: Missed the previous installments? View Part 1 and Part 2. ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: To stay updated on future events and the best news from the Startup Nation, sign up for our newsletter, email us, and follow us on social media.   View the FULL program Download/view the presentation Conquering The Term Sheet Everything You Need To Know About Deal Terms Part 3 from OurCrowd LLC [xyz-ihs...

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Advocate marketing anytime, anywhere: Q&A with Influitive CEO and founder Mark Organ

On an exploration of what makes advocate communities tick, we recently hosted an AMA (ask me anything) session with Mark Organ, CEO and founder of Influitive, a leading, B2B marketing software that allows companies to mobilize their customers into brand advocates. Influitive is a company that we know well. We’re not just investors, we’re also paying customers. OurCrowd has been using Influitive internally for the past few months to power employee advocacy and our investor community, Catalyst. OurCrowd’s investors and employees had the chance to ask Mark questions about his revolutionary advocate marketing platform, and the nascent advocate marketing industry in general. Advocacy Marketing Q&A with Mark Organ Zack: Where did the idea for Influitive come from? Mark: The idea for Influitive resulted from my experiences running Eloqua. We learned that advocacy was key to an efficient buying process and that referrals were 10xmore valuable than ordinary leads. But our initiatives to increase advocacy were not effective in generating a step increase in referrals, references and customer stories. Until one day when we created an awards ceremony and then we got...

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