CapLinked, an online platform that brings together companies and private individual investors, said it has eclipsed $ 10 billion in private deals listed on the platform since it launched a little over a year ago. Now, it’s opening up the platform to professional investors with a new product called DealRocket that targets venture capitalists, private equity firms, angel investors and hedge funds.
The $ 10 billion in listed deals means the amount of total money sought by companies looking to raise capital or sell assets. It’s unclear how many deals have actually closed and how much the transactions are worth.
CapLinked — which was founded by PayPal’s first head of marketing Eric Jackson and Christopher Grey, the former managing director at a subsidiary of Emigrant Bank — has tried to bridge the gap between companies looking to find financing and private investors looking to support start-ups. The company bills itself as a sort of LinkedIn meets Salesforce.com and provides a secure and social channel to facilitate deals, including CRM tools for entrepreneurs to pitch investors, manage their relationships and organize their document flow. Investors get an easy tool to track their portfolio and create a public profile and they can connect with entrepreneurs in “private deal rooms.”
CapLinked is now up to 90,000 accounts, a 4,000 percent increase since the beginning of the year. And there are 8,000 companies listed on CapLinked covering a range of industries. Though CapLinked was initially used by tech companies, now tech deals make up only one-third of the deals on the platform.
In August, CapLinked signed a deal with Microsoft allowing startups enrolled in Microsoft’s BizSpark accelerator program to get access to DealRocket, which was just rolling out with a limited number of angels and early stages VCs. Now, CapLinked is opening up its DealRocket program to any start-up, so they can choose to make their private deal room available to about 1,000 professional investors. The company expects to have 10,000 professional investors on the platform by the end of the year.
CapLinked has raised $ 1.25 million to date from members of the PayPal Mafia that include Peter Thiel (co-founder of PayPal), Dave McClure (500 Startups), Joe Lonsdale and Aman Verjee (CFO of Sonos) as well as from David Anderson (7th Rig). CapLinked has emerged at a fortuitous time as investing in start-ups has become a huge business. As long as the bubble doesn’t pop, it should be in a good place helping facilitate more and more deals.
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