by Stefania Peveraro
Editor-in-chief of BeBeez and founder and chairman of EdiBeez srl
Dear BeBeez readers,
after just over 9 years from the birth of this online newspaper, it was March 22, 2013, and 6 years after the birth of the publishing company EdiBeez srl, which at the same time also incorporated the information site specialized in crowdinvesting CrowdfundingBuzz, today is a great day for me and for our entire team. This morning at 11, in fact, EdiBeez will open its first round of capital raising with new investors on the CrowFundMe equity crowdfunding platform, with a maximum target of 400k euros, based on a pre-money valuation of 1.3 million euro.
So thank you. For real. Without you readers who have followed us over time, who have become more and more numerous, who do open our newsletters every morning on your mobile phone or on your PC, we would never have gotten this far.
EdiBeez is certainly still a small publishing company, but it is the only Italian publisher with a distinctive focus on private markets and a recognized leader on the online information market in the private equity, venture capital, crowdinvesting, private debt, distressed assets and private real estate. And it is the undisputed leader of this market, very vertical and specialized and has all the potential to make an important dimensional leap. The goal is now to provide the company with new resources to further strengthen itself in Italy and above all to grow abroad, acquiring more and more international readers and users.
The campaign, which started privately last week, has already been joined by some well-known names in the Italian world of finance, including Giuseppe Vegas, former Consob chairman, now a professor at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart of Milan and an active investor in startups and scaleups; Riv Capital, an investment company founded by the former Lehman Brothers Roberto Rivera; Norman Pepe, founder of the well known law firm iLS (London); Domenico Di Luccia, founder of Di Luccia & Partners Executive Search; ACDN srl, the investment vehicle of Alessandro Della Nina, vice president of Oaktree Capital Management in London, and Arturo Casale, a Milanese restaurant entrepreneur. I thank them all very much for the trust. On the other hand, they too are all devoted readers, who have known and appreciated BeBeez for some time.
The campaign, which will last two months, has a minimum investment ticket of one thousand euros for the B shares, which will enjoy only equity rights, while the A shares, dedicated to investors who will commit to at least 20k euros, also include the voting right at the general meeting and participation in the EdiBeez advisory board, a sort of “club” within which investors can periodically discuss trends in the private assets market and discuss the opportunity to conduct ad hoc research or to develop new products or services.
The new investors will thus join in the EdiBeez capital as well as me, the co-founders Fabio Allegreni (ceo and editorial director of CrowdfundingBuzz), Antonella Negri Clementi (director, founder of the strategic consulting firm Global Strategy), Roberto Spada (founder of the well-known Milanese accounting firm Spada Partners) and Lorenza Spriano(director, founder of the communication company Spriano Communication).
The founders are holders of AA shares, which enjoy multiple voting rights. In order to protect the rights of new investors, the EdiBeez bylaws provide in any case that for three years from the end of the round, in the event of sale to third parties of the company, the A and B shares, subject to the bylaws to a drag clause (drag- along), cannot be sold at a value lower than what will be defined post-money, i.e. 1.7 million euros, in the case of complete subscription of the round, on the basis of a pre-money valuation of 1.3 millions.
The new resources will be used in detail to strengthen the team of journalists involved in the drafting of BeBeez and CrowdfundingBuzz articles and the analysis team of BeBeez Private Data, the BeBeez private capital database, which monitors all the Italian companies in the portfolio of private investors. equity, venture capital and private debt, understood in a broad sense, therefore not only structured investment funds, but also holding companies, club deals, SPACs, business angels and securitization vehicles.
Not only that. The capital raised will also go to strengthen EdiBeez’s commercial structure and to finance a marketing campaign in Italy and abroad, a marketing activity that had never been undertaken until now. All the growth carried out by EdiBeez up to now, in fact, was due to word of mouth and excellent indexing on Google thanks to the remarkable and recognized quality of the content produced. Finally, the capital raised will be used to support further software developments of the online platforms both on the editorial front and on the database front.
We have come so far only with our strength and thanks to the diligence of you readers and I am proud to say that in recent years we have earned a strong reputation on the field in this market that is very specialized and that in Italy does not see other players like us. We were inspired by international examples that have had great success and have reached really important dimensions, but we have also chosen to use an Italian approach and to monitor the entire private asset market, considering even the smallest companies. All this always going beyond mere news and providing insights and background on all the topics covered, strengthened by our database. Not surprisingly, precisely because we have developed our BeBeez Private Data database, EdiBeez has been registered as an innovative SME (a status that in Italy allows our investors for enjoying the related fiscal invcentives). Now we want to make a dimensional leap and to do so we need fresh capital, which we believe we will be able to best remunerate within a few years.
With Fabio Allegreni, ceo of EdiBeez, who has a solid background in the field of consulting to startups in the search for capital on equity crowdfunding platforms, we have drawn up an industrial plan on an absolutely conservative basis. Nonetheless, the plan foresees that revenues in 2024 will be 4x those of 2021, a year in which they have already grown by 23.7% since 2020, which in turn had seen an increase in turnover of 19.9%. The idea is to accelerate growth, expanding the audience of readers internationally, and therefore also of our subscription services, offering on the one hand much more content in English dedicated to the Italian market and on the other creating a European private hub. capital, also in English, in which to bring together, thanks to artificial intelligence, all the news on the subject of private assets offered by the most authoritative sources of information.
Click here to view EdiBeez’s equity crowdfunding campaign
EdiBeez’s industrial plan will be presented on Monday 11 April at 4 pm
in a Zoom webinar in partnership
with IBAN, the Italian Business Angels Network
click here for information and registration
To thank our reader-investors who will invest at least 5k euros in our round,
EdiBeez gives an annual subscription to BeBeez Private Data the private capital database
