The data of the BlackRock study, which were presented, speak for themselves: 57% of people do not invest in the financial market in general, they do not buy shares or shares or bonds (be they public or private, therefore companies). This is because 27% of non-investors are afraid of losing all the capital invested; 54% believe they do not have enough capital to start investing; 64% find information on investments difficult to understand while 43% are too worried about the current economic situation to start thinking about the future.
In Italy the situation is not very different from the rest of the world: although 78% of Italians save and have capital available (with a propensity to save above the average), only 47% invest, especially in shares or real estate investments. The assets of Italian families are around € 4,300 billion (of which € 1,400 billion are held in current or savings accounts), but only slightly more than € 200 million are investments in the world of venture capital and dedicated to the actual launch of new projects: a huge money supply that does not flow into the country’s production system.
Why for SEED Venture is extremely important to finance innovation? Because financing new companies is fundamental for the growth of a country’s economy; because you invest in a real, concrete and tangible economy (and not in a “synthetic” finance); last but not least, because the possible gains from these investments can be substantial. Without forgetting that “innovating” means contributing to improving people’s lives, from any point of view (personal, professional, interacting with other people) and for any type of sector; therefore investing in innovation means grasping the potential of these new ideas, contributing to their existence and obtaining tendentially very high returns.
Today you can participate in the active life of a startup in only one way: investing through the capital increases launched by startups with the aim of attracting new funds for their project. The only way to invest in a startup today is to become a partner, get shares in exchange; when the startup then acquires a value in the market and reaches the quotation in the financial market, or a big players acquire the entire property, the shareholders will sell their shares obtaining the surplus value, or realizing the «exit». There have been exits in Italy, and there will still be some (current successful companies, such as Satispay, which will almost certainly be an upcoming “exit”). But the reality of the data must make us think, because the exit is still to be considered a black swan: it is in fact a very rare event, especially in Italy, where for example in 2018 only 6 startups made their investors happy; yet if we look at the total number of startups born more or less in the same period, we can see that they were over 1,000!
It is therefore clear how most small, but also large, investors stay away from all this. There are in fact many risk factors in financing startups: the invested capital is blocked for no less than 5 years and 90% of the startups statistically do not reach success; it is also very difficult to be able to give an opinion on the possibility of success of a startup by anyone and, if we add the thousand difficulties given by the management of the company shares, we understand how this market is the prerogative of a few experts. This turns into a reduced flow of capital destined for new companies against the huge resources that would be available: the result is a brake on innovation, and therefore few funded startups, and a little rewarding support from incubators.
Actors, incubators and accelerators, which could have a true role as assistants for the development and growth of new initiatives if they are adequately incentivized: they are only 170 in Italy, and today they are mainly concerned with offering physical spaces where they can operate, provide training (training and mentoring) together with a support in the design of the business model, creating business networking opportunities and facilitating access to potential investors, and finally providing legal and administrative help in the early stages.
The SEED Venture platform aims to revolutionize this world thanks to solutions that clearly and concretely respond to the main problems exposed, in order to convince investors to finance startups:
– Thanks to the proposed architecture, which includes a native token (SEED) which functions as a value transfer currency and many tokens each representing a startup pool (tokens all exchangeable within an internal decentralized exchange), what today is considered illiquid, centralized and complex, it will become liquid, transparent and simple.
– The risk of not re-entering on the investment will be decreased thanks to a new approach: we will invest not on a single startup but on a pool that includes many, and this pool will be the result of careful selection by an expert, the assistant ( incubator / accelerator), which is encouraged to choose the best startups on behalf of investors because it gets much more attractive revenue incentives than the current model. Thanks to the underlying technology, which guarantees transparency and immutability, a healthy and real competition between the various assistants will be developed for the first time, which will in turn be encouraged to stimulate and guide their startups to success, each with different strategies so that the investor bets on the pool they have selected.
– It will be possible to invest how, when and how much you want: the platform is permissionless, and the only rules for participating in the financing will be set by the incubators (each based on the business model they will present), thus allowing a complete decision-making flexibility.
SEED Venture combines the introduction of the concept of tokenization of risk capital with a rewarding and merit-based model in the selection and support for success, so that all the parties involved (investors, assistants, startups) converge their interests: a healthy and transparent competition between assistants, on the one hand, and the greatest possible distribution of risk, together with the ease with which the investment is liquidated by investors.
Participating in this innovative platform is very simple: the investor will only have to download the client to access the platform, view the pools, choose the one he prefers and invest in it; while the assistant (incubators, accelerators etc.) will download the client, define its business model and present the pool, which will include the startups it considers best, proposing to accompany them to success.
SEED Venture wants to represent the solution that can open the way for anyone who wants to participate by investing in innovation, in conditions and mechanisms that are acceptable to everyone, so that no good idea is wasted.
