Another Crowdcube business abandons ship.

AngelBerry Frozen Yogurt raised £200k on Crowdcube in 2014. Now their website is closed and has been for sometime. Accounts were filed late but now they are, they show a company way past the edge. Insolvent is the technical term and this is the second filing showing this. 

The company was due to be making profits of £1.7m in 2016; instead they made a £10k loss. Predcitable? Oh yes, this is Crowdcube, whose own accounts show a £5m plus loss against a predicted £1m plus profit. 

Two tweets since Sept 2016. Only 695 followers. 

Meanwhile no doubt, the successful entrepreneurs portrayed in their Crowdcube pitch have moved onto other ventures. Ryan Pasco, one of the founders, has set up 2 businesses since Angel Berry funded on CC - neither looking good. He is sometimes British and sometimes Australian in the CH filings. His mate James Taylor hasnt been so active - maybe he was actually trying to make Angelberry work?

The business was supposed to be sold this year for over £14m - their figures in the Crowdcube pitch.

Right from the start in 2014, all projections have been way off target.  

As we keep saying - this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to companies that have not closed officially but have died.

We wrote about them before here   - it was a death foretold. 

Angelberry aims high and shoots low - like most Crowdcube successes

This is now the new norm - fantastical projections met head on by sober realities for Crowdcube investors.

This company raised £200k on Crowdcube in 2014. Its still functioning but has failed to get anywhere near to the revenues and profits its fantasy projections sold to the Crowdcube investors. 

Accounts for 2014 and just over half of 2015 (the date was changed for some reason) show heavy accumulated losses of £350k against projected profits estimated at £300k plus. Promised deals with units in Africa and the ME (in the pitch there were over 50 contractual commitments quoted) have come to nout.

We wrote to them to ask politely why they were so far off their targets. We had no response.

In one of the more ludicrous Crowdcube moments, their pitch talks about a possible exit in Q1 of 2017 at 8.5 times earnings ie according to the fantasy projections that would bring in £14.5m anytime now. 

More Trumponics. No really these guys are great - Im telling you. Really really great. Dont believe the fake figures at CH. 

Where are they now? 3 of the Best - Our version.

Just Park raised £3.5m on Crowdcube on a business model that has now been shown to be a little fluffy.

The Crowdcube plans showed the company making losses. in 2015 but only £400k not the £1.7m just filed.

We said at the time that the main flaw with their car park sharing model was that the people projected to make all the money were not the owners of the spaces but Just Park. This has proven to be spot on. There are numerous examples for the past year of people booking a space and arriving only to find that the space is taken and there is no way at such short notice to sort out the problem. Some people end up with £100 parking fines as a result. Customer service appears to be poor. Looking at Trust Pilot reviews. we are struck by the complete contrast between the 5 start reviews and the 1 star reviews - not much in between. A bit like Marmite.

When we questioned JP on this flaw they just said na - it's not a problem. We now have £1.3m of extra losses to prove it. They may yet get to grips with it but we doubt they will be able to scale to a level that will see any CC investors getting returns. Their main hope now must be that JP don,t fold just yet. There has been more money raised and will no doubt be more in the future - all diluting the CC shareholders. 4 of the Directors left in 2015.

GrubKlub

Yet another internet business that only makes losses, Grubclub or Klub, showed exceptional growth in their Crowdcube pitch when they raised £288k in January 2015. They used the unlikely metric of GMV to big up their sales pitch or show traction as they put it. GMV for those not in the know is the total sales value for a company that is say commission only based and gives a highly misleading image of a company's size. So for example the GMV for Grubklub in 2014 was a projected £400k (which at the time of the pitch was in reality an historic figure). The real sales value as reported in the filed accounts at CH for this was £34,994. Now the 2015 accounts are also filed and show a net revenue of £34,189. In the Crowdcube pitch this 2015 figure was given as £157k on a GMV of £1.7m. From the figures it looks like the real GMV was around £400,000 - so zero growth.

We emailed Grubclub and were told that our numbers were all wrong; although when asked they failed to provide the numbers that were correct. Either the filed accounts are wrong in which case this is for HMRC to look into, or they are way off target.

Angel Berry

Raised £190k in 2014 on Crowdcube. Despite the fantastic projections that Crowdcube allowed them to use to sell the equity - Angel Berry have made actual real losses of over £340k to date  - breaking most records in 2015 by filing losses of £150k against Crowdcube projections showing EBITDA of £612k. That's worth a gold medal surely.