We’re excited to announce the launch of Cubex, our marketplace for buying and selling shares in Europe’s high-growth businesses.
Cubex will give you the opportunity to tell us which private European businesses you’d like to buy shares in or sell your existing stake, creating liquidity and the chance to realise a return on your investment without having to wait for an IPO or trade sale.
We’ve already managed secondary share sales for the likes of Revolut, BrewDog and Freetrade [and monzo], with shareholders having the chance to realise over £16m in returns.
You can use an existing Crowdcube account to link to the Cubex service, then either apply to Buy or Sell from your Crowdcube portfolio.
I tried to buy Monzo shares, but they’re obviously not available as it simply registered my interest and informed I’d be notified when shares became available. I wonder if you can actually sell your shares (I don’t want to, so didn’t try it) by puting them into a pool of availability for others to buy via Cubex?
This is very beta… so manual and opaque by the looks of it. Why don’t they just copy and paste what Seedrs do? The secondary market model is literally tried and tested by their biggest rival.
I guess one of their issues is that because their merger with Seedrs was blocked they need a model that’s not too close to what they made aware of in Seedrs roadmap during their due diligence/discussions?
We’re talking about a market to buy and sell shares. It’s not reinventing the wheel, there’s very little to nothing proprietary about a free/auctioning market. Just have an automated system that publishes bids and asks, and match them. Instead, this looks like a form filling processed by humans in the background… not very scalable.
I have to agree. I remember being invited to Crowdcube’s alpha version of a secondary market about 2 years ago. It was basically a table that anyone could fill in that listed buys and sells. It was, even for an alpha, one of the ugliest and most “we need this building by the end of the day” jobs I’ve ever seen.
That was about two years ago. I was quite excited seeing an email today about the actual launch of a secondary market. I’m pretty bummed out, that again, it’s just a a glorified typeform for buy and a glorified typeform for sell. I understand there’s a huge deal of regulatory and legal work that goes on to make this sort of product happen, but wow does Crowdcube fall short, consistently, on customer experience.
Do Crowdcube not have any web engineers? I can see the frontend for Cubex uses a CMS - have they really had no engineering time to dedicate to a better UX than a typeform after two years of development?
Edit… Dan beat me to it but here’s pretty much the same reply from me…
They had a beta for their secondary market about 3 or 4 years ago. It was crap and they scrapped it pretty quick, so i hope this one has 4 years of upgrades added, because the last one was literally just a page saying “Billy Nomates would like to buy 1000 Revolut shares for 1p. Contact us if interested in making a deal”, you clicked on interested then it got lost in tinternet never to be heard from again.
You couldn’t pick Monzo from the list of companies and if I recall correctly it was due to Monzo’s restrictive articles which say you cannot sell unless transferring to eligible relatives or due to serious emergency approved in a Board meeting. Hopefully that has changed now but doubt it.
Most likely gonna be a case of diamond hands till IPO whether you like it or not
I hate all this carrot dangling stuff … I would rather CEO’s just kept quiet on things like this until the paperwork is being signed rather than get peoples hopes up.
that’s the funniest thing I have seen on this forum - ever - period