In a welcome move for startups and innovative businesses, the
Government has committed $7.8 million in the Budget to remove
obstacles for crowd sourced equity funding in Australia.
Crowd funding is a world-wide phenomenon and has the potential
to significantly boost the start-up and small-scale enterprise
sector in Australia across all industries.
In this alert, Partner Michelle Eastwell discusses the budget
initiatives for crowd sourced equity funding and how this could
open up new funding opportunities for your business.
Equity crowd funding enables entrepreneurs to raise funds online
from a large number of retail investors. Unfortunately, Australia
currently lags behind a number of other countries such as the US,
Canada and New Zealand who already facilitate equity crowd funding.
There remains a number of significant obstacles to undertaking
crowd sourced equity funding in Australia (discussed in our
previous
Alert) and at present it is generally only open
