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Ever wondered how can you become a venture capitalist or an angel investor? 🕵️‍♂️💸

If you’ve somehow navigated to this article, chances are you might be a non-accredited investor.

Now who’s that? 🤔

Well, an accredited investor is someone who:

• Has a net worth of 1 million dollars (or above) 💰; or

• Has earned $200,000 (or above) consistently in the past 2 years and expect the same this year — Time to go back to checking your W2s! 🧾

If you don’t fall in either of these categories listed above, you fall under non-accredited investor status.

More often than not, especially during these unprecedented times, new investors are rising to grow their assets, either by venturing into real estate, purchasing REITs, bonds, company stocks, index funds/ETFs, cryptocurrencies, lottery tickets, the list can go on and on!

In case you are an accredited investor and intend to learn more about such investments, it might be time to expand your portfolio in early stage startups with high risk-high reward strategy

Budding startups 💹

Now, as startups are rising in every corner of the world, in arenas ranging from technology to energy to financial sector, average income households seem to have gotten interested in ways in which they can think of becoming angel investors (or venture capitalists) by investing in these budding startups. High risk high reward right!

No sir! We are not talking about late stage rounds (Comes under Regulation D) where the startup has already become quite established (like Zoom or Uber prior to going IPO). Rather, we are looking into early round investing opportunities for beginners who are willing to put their money/stake in pre-seed, seed or early series (A, B) rounds.

Now, before we talk about how you can invest in early-stage startups, let's go 🔙 in time ⏳

Rise of crowdfunding platforms 🚀

Back in the days (prior to 2016), only accredited investors were eligible to invest in these early-stage startups and see their investment multiple 2X, 3X, 5X or even 10X in case of unicorn startups or successful exits!

Also, the minimum amount of investment that was required to invest in such select platforms (eg. Equityzen, Equitybee, Forgeglobal) was at-least $25,000–50,000.🤑 Now, to an average Joe's disappointment, who couldn't afford to invest that much into a startup, they always looked for alternatives.☝️

But wait, there's more! In 2016, some crowdfunding platforms rose from the ashes after Regulation Crowdfunding (Reg CF) was put into place by the SEC.

Regulation Crowdfunding enables eligible companies to offer and sell securities through crowdfunding. The rules: require all transactions under Regulation Crowdfunding to take place online through an SEC-registered intermediary, either a broker-dealer or a funding portal.

Silver Lining 🎉

Hurray! Now, anyone could invest in a Regulation Crowdfunding offering! 🥳👏🙌

Because of the risks involved with this type of investing, however, you are limited in how much you can invest during any 12-month period in these transactions.

After the Reg CF approval, a lot of crowdfunding platforms started hosting an arena for such early-stage startups to upload their offerings onto the respective portal.

Crowdfunding platforms 🏗️

Inception of such Crowdfunding platforms have led to an active yet healthy competition of these early-stage companies with higher visibility. Now, Millennials looking for alternative options can start pouring their money 💵 into such startups at preferred equity rounds right from the start! 🤝

Let's look at some of the crowdfunding platforms:

• Wefunder - This platform is rich in filtering options, recommendations and features to narrow down into a startup sector and look for startups to invest money 💲 with as low as $100! 💯

• Seedinvest - Another platform which claims to do extreme vetting of the startups being added to the platform for crowdfunding. A min. of $1000 is required to invest on the startups listed on this platform (in most cases). 🌱

• OurCrowd - An Israeli CF platform which has become the monolithic hub of burgeoning Israeli startups (which are doing extremely well across different sectors, from healthcare & energy to Blockchain and quantum). They also invest their own money on the startups listed on their portal. The min. Investment varies from $5,000 (in case of portfolio select option/plan) to $50,000 for blended funds. 🏦

• Microventures - This platform also allows variable amount ($3,000, $5,000 or $10,000, $50,000) for users to invest in early-stage companies after checking out the respective company offering of your choice.

• StartEngine - This is another evolved CF platform backed by the shark investor, Kevin O' Leary (aka Mr. Wonderful), which is very popular amongst early-stage and late-stage startups as well. 🚀

You can check out all these platforms and the companies (with their offerings) listed on them in order to get more insights. Go ahead and find the worthy ones of your choice!

Good luck with your future investments! 🤞

Disclaimer: I am in no way affiliated with any of these platforms. This article has been written with sheer intention to broadcast humble knowledge in the space for people interested in learning about investments.

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