The Brussels start-up that raised €1m in 15 minutes

Global stock markets suffered a volatile January, with investors anxiously selling off stocks. But away from the trading floor panic, in an auditorium in downtown Brussels, one Belgian firm succeeded in raising €1m from the general public in just 15 minutes.

MyMicroInvest has helped 31,000 people in 52 countries to invest in promising Belgian start-ups since it was founded in 2011, with a platform that aims to allow individual members of the public to co-invest on the same footing as professional business angels and venture capitalists.

Ventures backed so far include Brussels electric car-sharing scheme Zencar to the tune of €1.6m, Flemish Buzzfeed-style site Newsmonkey for €1.3m and Belgian craft beer discovery service Belgibeer, which was one of the earliest companies to use the service to raise €128,000. The average investment so far has been €886. The oldest investor is 85 and the youngest is two.

Now MyMicroInvest has raised for funds for itself, to try turning a Belgian success story into a European one, with a plan to launch offices in six countries including France, Italy and Switzerland.

Executive chairman José Zurstrassen says that with the average Belgian holding €29,000 in savings, there is a strong appetite for investing in businesses instead of "leaving money to sleep somewhere" with interest rates at rock-bottom. "Instead of depositing money in my children's savings account, my vision is to put money for them into the companies," he says.

Entrepreneurial spirit

MyMicroInvest also aims to ignite more of an entrepreneurial spirit in Belgium and tackle one of the biggest problems new firms face when starting out - getting access to working capital.

"We live in a country where only 4% of the population wants to become their own boss," says Zurstrassen - who sold his internet service provider Skynet to Belgacom and then sold his online brokerage site Keytrade to Crédit Agricole.

"6.6% [of people in Belgium] are full-time independent. It's 11% in Europe and 16% in Holland. We have a very small number of entrepreneurs in Belgium - and over the past decades a large number of companies that used to belong to Belgians started to be sold abroad, so there are fewer and fewer companies that are indeed Belgian. If you want those 96% of Belgians who do not want to become entrepreneurs to find jobs, then we need new companies."

Zurstrassen adds: "The first risk for the entrepreneur - the first mistake - is under-capitalisation, when the entrepreneur does not have enough money to transfer his dream into reality. I can see that on a daily basis. Most companies are created with a minimal capital, not the adequate capital. It's usually way too low.

"If we eliminate part of the risk of the entrepreneurial voyage we will help new candidates see that there is a path that will help them create a new economic activity from scratch. We are not going to change the way people think or the absence of entrepreneurial culture in Belgium overnight, but over one or two or three generations it will force an improvement."

A third of MyMicroInvest's crowdfunders are women, and the most-popular business sectors for new ventures are healthcare, food and education. Zurstrassen says the average annual return so far has been 7.3% - but investment is a long-term game.

Ambassadors

Aside from the financial input, investors also provide word-of-mouth advertising for the businesses they back. "The small investors are the ambassadors of the company," he says. "When you have 31,000 investors there are always several dozen investors who work in the very business field your company needs help in. They become opinion-leaders."

He gives the example of the makers of an anti-allergy device, Domobios, which achieved €370,000 in funding. "We called investors and asked them, the next time they go to a pharmacy, to talk about the product," says Zurstrassen. "All of them did it. They visited hundreds of pharmacies and all of the inventory sold in one week."

The plan now is for MyMicroInvest to launch pan-European crowdfunding campaigns. The firm has also developed the concept of "live crowdfunding" - like an episode of Dragon's Den in which all of the audience can get involved. Entrepreneurs take to the stage regularly in Brussels to present their business to a crowd who can invest in real-time using their smartphone or tablet, or remotely via a webstream with questions via Twitter. MyMicroInvest reached its €1m live crowdfunding goal in about a quarter of an hour - and is now nearing €5m with about three months left to run on its crowdfunding campaign.