The UK’s largest crowdfunding platform reported a “hard-fought” full-year profit last year, driven by a rise in secondary liquidity and cutting costs across the business, says one of its CEOs.
Matt Cooper, Crowdcube co-CEO, says: “The change has been dramatic. Two to three years ago, we didn’t do any secondaries. We were a primary-only fundraising platform. This year, we could be getting up to 50 per cent of our entire business through secondaries."
Crowdcube has seen some high-profile startups, such as Monzo and Revolut (in their early days), carry out primary raises on its platform, which was founded in 2011 as the UK’s first equity crowdfunding platform.
Over £1.5bn has been invested in private companies through Crowdcube.
Successes have included Nutmeg, the financial advice startup, backed by 2,000 Crowdcube users, which was bought by JP Morgan for £700m in 2021.
Last year, Freetrade, which raised around £30m on Crowdcube, was sold to online investing platform IG Group, albeit at a discounted valuation.
Hitting profitability
Crowdcube has not yet published its 2025 accounts at Companies House. In 2024, it made a loss of £6.2m on revenues of £9.8m but Cooper says it made a full-year net profit in 2025.
Along with the rise in secondary activity, Crowdcube’s swing into the black has also been driven by cutting costs across the business, he says.
Cooper says: “We worked very, very hard at being as efficient as possible. We are using AI in parts of our business and processes that we haven’t previously, which has enabled us to be more efficient.”
On any headcount reduction in 2025, Cooper says that there has been “natural attrition” from the around 80 people employed in 2024.
On the importance of being profitable, Cooper says: “Getting to profitability is an important metric. It shows that the unit economics of the business are working. It shows that you don’t have to be reliant on external capital.”
Rise in secondary market
In recent years, secondary share activity has become more commonplace, as startups free up cash for employees or VCs sell up amid an arid IPO market.
High-profile examples of recent secondary sale activity include Revolut, ElevenLabs and Trade Republic.
Crowdcube, which is mainly known as a platform allowing small private startups to sell their primary shares to the public, has expanded into the secondary market, acquiring secondary dealmaking startup Semper in 2023.
Cooper says secondaries have been a “boon” for Crowdcube, which has processed around $100m of secondaries through its platrorm in the past 18 months.
Crowdcube’s tech offers companies various secondary opportunities, including early-stage investor secondary sales to retail investors, employee secondaries to retail investors, and secondaries offered to Crowdcube investors from those startups that sold primary shares on Crowdcube.
In 2025, Crowdcube carried out secondary share sales for investment platform Chip, challenger bank Atom Bank, and Estonian ride-hailing startup Bolt.
A secondary share sale in French AI startup Mistral was carried out on Crowdcube this year.
Cooper says: “What we are focused on is giving UK and European retail and high net worth investors the chance to access shares in some of the best private businesses on earth.”
Some of these secondary deals are not direct. For example, the Bolt deal is for Bolti UK Holding Ltd, a UK-registered Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV)- a type of investment fund- that holds thousands of shares in Bolt Technology OÜ, Bolt’s parent company. Bolt is not involved in the transaction. Likewise, the Mistral sale was done via an SPV.
Secondaries through PISCES
Another secondary share opportunity for investors offered by Crowdcube is through a partnership with the London Stock Exchange to enable investing in private company shares through the new PISCES (Private Intermittent Securities and Capital Exchange System) framework.
There has been much fanfare accompanying the launch of PISCES, which the UK regulator, the FCA, hopes will boost UK growth and competitiveness.
Revolut, Octopus and OakNorth were amongst businesses considering joining the new private stock market after being courted by the London Stock Exchange last year, according to CityAM.
But Octopus boss Greg Jackson has since said the utilities giant had “no plans” to use the exchange. Oxford Sciences Enterprises, an early-stage VC fund which has invested in Oxford Ionics, was the first company to trade on PISCES.
Addressing the slow start of PISCES, Cooper says “it’s not something that happens overnight”.
Cooper says: “We’ve got an incredibly strong pipeline of companies that are considering using the private securities market, like real household names. The thing everybody was focused on was proof of concept.”
Primary listings
Last year, Chip, the investment platform, raised £8.9m on Crowdcube, one of Crowdcube’s largest-ever primary funding rounds, while Nothing, the UK-based smartphone disruption, also raised on Crowdcube.
This year, Cooper says primary fundraising has been hit by the war in the Middle East.
Cooper says: “This has had an impact on institutional investment rounds and companies closing institutional investment rounds on the primary side. We tend to ebb and flow as the market ebbs and flows.”
But he adds: “We feel like we have a really nice hedge, which is that if companies aren’t raising primary capital either because they don’t want to or because they are profitable, they will be looking at how to provide liquidity to shareholders in the absence of raising primary.”
One recent primary fundraiser has been French bitcoin savings app Bitstack, which raised nearly €4m from over 8,000 investors.
Crowdfunders lose out on Freetrade deal
Over the years, Crowdcube has been hit with complaints of misleading pitches, sometimes in relation to companies that closed shortly after securing funds.
Last year, IG Group acquired the trading app Freetrade for £160m, which was a near 30 per cent valuation discount on its last valuation of £225m.
Freetrade was a big user of Crowdcube, raising around £30m across 10 rounds, but some crowdfunding investors lost more than 80 per cent of their stake, according to The Times.
Cooper said: “Whilst this was disappointing for all investors involved, not just Crowdcube investors, we are very, very clear when we offer an investment opportunity to investors that this is a high-risk asset class."
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