Darksquare

Idea

Introduction

Welcome to Darksquare, we’re looking to open up the world of alternative investments to individuals.

Right now, unless you’re incredibly wealthy, you’re mostly limited to investing in equities, ETFs and cryptocurrencies. But there’s a multi-trillion dollar world of other asset classes out there that are, at present, mostly inaccessible to individuals.

Ranging from assets such as distressed/special situations credit, to large ticket real estate items like forests/timberland, private islands, to wind and solar farms, carbon capture projects and many more.

We believe that individuals are more capable and more willing than ever to make their own investment decisions, so we’re not an investment advice or an investment management platform; instead we’re using crowdfunding to overcome minimum investment thresholds and open up these products to a wider market. Allowing customers to not only generate potential returns, but crucially, better diversify their investment portfolios.

Substantial accomplishments to date

Darksquare is early stage, having existed for approximately a year and a half. We've made significant progress in the last few months, specifically:

- Securing funding from several 'angel investors' with experience in the financial services/tech space. We plan for some of these investors to also serve as informal advisors to the business.

- Finishing the development of our MVP (beta) and updated landing page.

- Become authorised by the FCA through an Appointed Representative.

- Hiring Renata who is our Head of Marketing on a consultative basis.

- Hiring Robin to head up our design/front end development.

- Launching our blog on alternative investing (https://medium.com/alternate-angle).

- Growing our LinkedIn following to 1.5k followers.

Monetisation strategy

We will look to charge fees on the money invested via our site. Our plan is to charge 1% upfront and then 1% annually as a management fee.

Rather than charging cash management fees, we plan to take 1% ownership of the asset every year, aligning our incentives with those of our customers. This means if an investment product performs well, we get paid more. This also ensures we only list quality, well researched investments on our site.

In the future, we plan to launch a secondary market functionality where users can buy into or sell out of previously funded investments. Once established, we would look to charge trading fees on these transfers to generate additional revenue.

We will not sell user data or advertise on our site, we think it's important that the user experince is as seamless as possible.

Finally, we'll also plan to generate a small amount of revenue from bid/offer spreads on the investments we list. For example, we might buy a stake in a wind farm for £495k and list it for £500k.

Use of proceeds

This round is intended to get us to launch, and generate some early traction. We want to give everyone the opportunity to get involved at this early stage.

Funds will be used for the following:

Product development: Our platform is the core of our business. Ensuring that customers have a great user experience and all funds are processed and invested securely is the most important thing to us. We'll be using the majority of the funds we raise to maintain our site and provide the best and most secure UX possible.

Marketing: Customer acquisition is a key focus for us. We've already carried out some consumer research and have hired Renata to help us nail our go-to-market strategy. We'll be strategically spending funds on advertising with a view to acquiring high quality, active users.

Legal and Compliance: As an FCA regulated firm we need to pay monthly fees to our Appointed Representative to ensure all customers are treated fairly and that we comply with all KYC/AML best practices.