Clear Books plc raises £839,913 from its customers – thank you!

We did it!

Thank you to everyone, all 735 of you who now own a part of Clear Books.

We took a unique approach to fundraising. We re-registered as a plc and built our own investor platform to accept applications and to issue share certificates. To my knowledge we are the first company in the world, that is not a crowdfunding service, to raise £839,913 from our customers in this way and keep a lid on fees at less than 1%.

We did all of this in the public domain knowing that if we were not successful then any failure would haunt us. But we are an innovative, ambitious and confident British company that acts rather than ponders.

I am delighted to say that Cloud Funding was an overwhelming success. We raised the full investment we were seeking with the final 2 shares being bought at 1:03pm on Thursday 31st October 2013 with 10 hours and 57 minutes to spare. When the 700k milestone was passed early on in the final morning, we literally could not approve the applications fast enough and indeed the offer ended up being oversubscribed:

• 140 people applied for an additional £137k worth of shares.
• At the time of writing a further 226 people are on a waiting list of interested investors for future opportunities.

A board meeting will be held on Monday 4th November to review the share offer fully and confirm next steps, and a further update will follow next week.

The first five years building Clear Books has been a challenge to create a product, get traction with a solid customer base and build a great team. I am really excited about the next leg of our journey. I truly believe that what we have achieved with Cloud Funding, and bringing our customers into the fold as shareholders, is the platform for the next leg of growth to create a business software company for the long term. A company that will rival the dominance of Sage and IRIS in the UK, but importantly has a completely unique culture exactly because our customers are our shareholders.

735 of you now have a vested interest in Clear Books achieving this goal so if you have ideas about how we can execute our strategy to work closely with the accounting practice channel then I would love to hear from you. Please drop me an email.

Once again, thank you for being a part of this because the most important number on the day was the 735 of you who are now sharing the journey. There will be ups and downs but as with our share offer we aim to continue with transparency and enthusiasm that you would expect from a company with a mission to become the leading cloud business software platform in the UK.

Tim Fouracre
Founder & CEO
Clear Books plc