Seedrs also offers the opportunity to certain businesses to sign up and invest in the various investment opportunities available on our platform.
In order to start your journey as an institutional investor, please make sure to gather all the relevant information about your business beforehand to not experience any significant delays.
Let’s get started!
Step 1: Sign up and confirm your email
When signing up to Seedrs, you will be prompted to enter your email address, set a password, and sign the membership agreement. The membership agreement sets out the terms of the relationship between Seedrs and you as a user of our service. After completing this and verifying your email address, press the 'I am registering an institution' button on the 'Personal details' page.
You will then be prompted to insert basic details about your institutional account
Step 2: Risk Warning and appropriateness test
Before selecting your investor profile, you will be prompted to confirm your acknowledgement of the risks of investing in early-stage businesses. This will be achieved by completing a quiz about the risks of investing and we strongly recommend reading our detailed rundown of the risks of investing in our Risk Warnings page before starting the quiz, as we require all questions to be answered correctly in order to progress to the next steps.
Warning: if you fail the quiz twice, you will be locked from any further attempts for 24 hours. A timer will start and once it ends you will be allowed to try again.
Step 3: Select your investor profile to become authorised to invest
As a business, you'll also need to ‘self certify’ as a particular profile of investor. This means you'll simply need to select one of the three profiles that you are presented with that most aligns with your personal experience of investing. As an FCA authorised firm, with high risk investments, we are required to ensure that all of our investors are categorised appropriately. The three investor profiles are as follows:
Everyday investor
As an everyday investor, you should invest less than 10% of your net assets each year in: shares, bonds, funds or other securities that are not listed on an exchange
Sophisticated investor
You have invested in more than one unlisted company or you have been a director of a company with annual turnover of at least £1 million or you have been a member of a business angels network for at least the last six months.
High net worth investor
You earn more than £100,000 per year, or hold net assets of at least £250,000.
The questions in this section will vary depending on the profile you select. If you’re not sure which one is most relevant to you, you can choose to take a quick questionnaire to guide you through choosing the most appropriate profile. It will ask you five questions and based on the answers will then present you with a result.
Step 4: Verify your identity
You will now have the choice to verify the identity of your business to complete your account opening and enable the ability to invest in campaigns, or exit the journey for now to browse the platform and view the full details of campaigns, but not invest.
If you choose to verify your identity to complete the journey then you will be taken through the next steps to verify your business. You will receive an email from our team requesting the information we need to be able to verify your business. Please bear in mind that for the purposes of verifying an institutional account, we need to verify all the directors, all the shareholders owning 25% or more of the business, and also the representative talking with us on behalf of the business (in case they are none of the previous).
Once you've submitted the required information, our team will just need to verify your identity and we'll send you an email to let you know once it's complete.