Ruby Datum, the virtual data room (VDR) pioneer, has partnered with Crowdcube, the European crowdfunding site, to provide its services to the group’s community to help with compliance, fundraising activities, and document collaboration.
The VDR platform will be offered for free to the ‘Funded Community’ of Crowdcube for a period of one year. After the initial free year working with Ruby Datum customers will then have the option to move to a paid arrangement. But the company noted that free users ‘can export all their data in any instance’, regardless of what they choose to do.
Ruby Datum knows Crowdcube well, as last year it ran its own fundraising on the site, raising over £136,000 from around 170 individual investors. (It also bagged additional investment from other sources to hit around £200,000 in total.) And now it’s with this kind of scenario where Ruby Datum will be offering its services, helping companies handle the complex flow of documents involved in a crowdfunding.
The move follows another partnership, formed in New York in April with transaction management system Dealcloser to provide a broader platform for M&A deals and the documents involved.
But back to the latest deal.
Alex Timmons, Portfolio Manager at Crowdcube, commented: ‘Being a marketplace, we are totally aligned with the success of the businesses we raise for. A successful exit will mean returns for shareholders on our platform.
‘We therefore want to help businesses make the most out of the funding we provide them and give them the tools, guidance and expertise where possible to help them grow through to exit. Ruby Datum has been through the Crowdcube process themselves and therefore understands very well what our portfolio companies require when it comes to fundraising and important areas for startups.
‘We love seeing our portfolio companies collaborate and we hope that this fantastic offer from Ruby Datum will inspire plenty of the Funded Community to work with them.’
Crowdcube also stressed that they do more than just help to raise capital, they added that the company also ‘supports businesses in their Funded Community all the way through to exit by providing access to various services and expertise to help their portfolio companies grow, maximising the impact of their investment’.
Nick Watson, CEO, Ruby Datum, concluded: ‘Ruby Datum is all about user experience. We want to make life easy for businesses and provide a secure, efficient, and intuitive environment that helps collaborate seamlessly with all the stakeholders in the investment eco-system without any fear of losing your data.
‘We’ve been through the pitch curation, fundraising, and post-success compliance ourselves and have a vision for a natural progression with businesses in the Crowdcube community through these stages and on to the future of growth for their company.’
The company added that Ruby Datum ‘offers a highly customisable, brandable interface for document collaboration with dedicated developers on hand to build a smooth flow of data from and to other tech platforms’.