Behind Birchal’s second fastest CSF equity raise in Australian history

On the back of the robust quarterly report card for the CSF industry, Birchal has set its own record in the past 24 hours for its equity raise. The raise was the second fastest to reach $3m from opening to EOIs to date, achieving the target in just one hour and three minutes.

This was just behind ZeroCo’s 47 minutes to reach the same amount, on its way to $5m in less than seven hours, still Australia’s biggest CSF campaign, hosted by Birchal last year.

How will Birchal use the raised equity?

The funds raised will go towards building Australia’s first equity crowdfunding ecosystem. This move will establish SMEs and Startups as a mainstream asset class and will facilitate secondary trading and best in class stakeholder engagement, features that will attract even more retail and sophisticated investors to Australia’s exciting startup landscape.

Well known tech investor, Dom Pym, led the round, following on from his early investment, having invested over $1m in Birchal, with the remaining investors coming in through Birchal’s expression of interest process, including a broad mix of retail and wholesale investors.

“It was a great result, but it’s not about breaking records for us. Closing the offer quickly means we can get back to supporting our clients as soon as possible,” said Matt Vitale.

How did it’s clients fare during the web traffic increase?

The Birchal platform experienced a 480% increase in web traffic for the duration of the campaign compared to the same period last year as a result of its marketing efforts. The attention received does not seem to have affected the performance of other campaigns, with a series of good results being achieved during Birchal’s campaign, including:

• Cassava Bags, $596k raised, 24 March 2022
• Sneaker Laundry, $900k raised, 24 March 2022
• Zorali, $1.2m raised, 31 March 2022
• Roogenic, $800k raised, 5 April 2022 (max target hit in 2 hours)
• Pokit Innovations, $334k raised, 7 April 2022
• Yondr Money, $538k raised, 7 April 2022

What next for Birchal?

The Birchal CSF Offer was scheduled to close on 28 April 2022. Investors that got in have five business days’ cooling off rights, so Birchal’s CSF offer is not technically complete until all cooling off rights have expired and the offer can be deemed ‘fully subscribed’.

Because of this, Birchal is still accepting applications, which will be ‘under review’ in case any investors exercise their cooling off rights. At the time of writing, Birchal had over $1.8m in under review applications, showing the strength of oversubscriptions for its offer.

“We have made a real effort to minimise disruption to our clients as a result of our own CSF Offer. We were hopeful that the offer would reach its maximum target quickly, and set our maximum target accordingly,” said Matt Vitale, Birchal’s co-founder and Managing Director.

“We have been blown away by the response. We were confident we’d reach our maximum target quickly, but really didn’t expect it would have been this quick. But it’s a good result, because now we can get back to work and support the many companies we are helping to prepare their own CSF Offers. It’s shaping up to be a really strong finish to the financial year.”

 Live and upcoming Birchal campaigns:

• DrinkWest
• Make out meals
• Erin Living
• HeapsGood packaging
• AirGuides
• The Shade
• Zea
• Australian Museum of Design
• The Good Seed
• GiveTree