Israel’s OurCrowd raises $72mn to boost crowdfunding deals

Bloomberg

OurCrowd Ltd., a website that connects investors to a pool of mostly Israeli and U.S. startups, said it raised $72 million to expand its operations and invest in other businesses.
Jon Medved, the chief executive officer and co-founder of OurCrowd, said the new funds will be split evenly between the venture arm and the company itself, which plans to use the money to open more offices around the world. The Jerusalem-based equity crowdfunding platform has a global network of 15,000 investors and has helped facilitate $300 million in investments to 100 startups since it was founded in 2013.
With $36 million earmarked for OurCrowd’s operations, it’s the largest pure equity investment in a crowdfunding company, according to Crowdnetic, a New York-based research firm. Israeli VC funds have raised $540 million this year, according to researcher PitchBook Data Inc.
OurCrowd is similar to AngelList or EquityNet, but it tries to act more like a traditional venture capital firm by vetting deals and investing in companies alongside the crowd. Like a traditional VC firm, it takes a 2 percent annual management fee over a maximum of four years and 20 percent to 25 percent of returns. San Francisco-based AngelList, which similarly takes a cut of returns, has been courting overseas investors to commit capital to its platform, partly to defend from a potential funding downturn, Bloomberg reported last week.
The average size of an OurCrowd investment is $2 million to $3 million, and the venture arm usually contributes about 4 percent of each round, Medved said. It aims to have $180 million flowing through its system this year, he said. Nine companies that have raised money through OurCrowd have been acquired or gone public, including ReWalk Robotics Ltd., an exoskelton maker that held an initial public offering in 2014.