Sweden’s response to Dealflow and Folkeinvest capitulates

Financial technology

Equity-based crowdfunding has never been successful in Sweden. Now the last remaining company is giving up.

On Sunday, the board of directors of People’s Finance Corporation sent… Pippin He issued a press release with the message that the business would be closed and all permits returned to the Financial Inspectorate.

“It is of course sad that we have reached a point where we have to end Pippins,” says Chairman Jonas Eriksson in a statement.

The reason behind the closure is said to be the difficult market situation and that it was difficult to find long-term financing for the company. Prickett writes.

Merged in 2021

In the summer of 2021, Pepins merged with Fundedbyme, another Swedish company that ran equity crowdfunding. The move was then presented as an offensive project, which gave impetus to the business. After the merger, the company became the Pippins Group and the crowdfunding business was placed in the Swedish subsidiary Pippins.

However, Pepins hit a wall last year, just like Norway’s Dealflow and Folkeinvest. The war in Ukraine, high interest rates and inflation have strongly affected interest in investing in unlisted stocks.

He hit Pippen more than his Norwegian teammates. Trading volume ended at NOK 8.5 million, a third of the previous year. The annual result reached minus NOK 20 million. In comparison, Folkeinvest had a turnover of NOK 17.1 million in 2022 and generated an annual profit of less than NOK 9.4 million. For Dealflow, last year ended with sales of $5.5 million and a deficit of $3.7 million.

Didn’t find any solution

But while Dealflow and Folkeinvest had a real boom at the start of 2023, problems continued for Pepins. This summer, the Pepins Group was liquidated after selling Pepins Sweden to technology startup Navian Tech for NOK 28 million. The settlement was executed with shares in Navian and gave the Pepins’ owners 12 percent of Navian.

Navian’s plan was to expand Pepin’s business into the real estate industry, at the same time as the existing business of facilitating issues and buying and selling of unlisted shares.

Pepins will have a wider product range when the purchase is completed. We have a clear plan on how to make the hospitality business more profitable, Founder Sergey Kazachenko told Breakit this summer.

But this sale was not successful either. In Sunday’s press release, Navian Tech wrote:

“Today, Navian Tech AB announces that the company, in cooperation with the Board of Directors of Pepins AB, is canceling the transaction. The parties have agreed that the most important conditions essential for the implementation of the transaction have not been met. »