INVESTORHUB STARTED HERE

Building strong investor ties

InvestorHub wants to bring public companies and investors closer.

Every listed company wants to develop a loyal relationship with investors, but until recently it’s been difficult to nurture this connection on a large scale.

InvestorHub co-founders Ben Williamson and Rhys Davis set out to bring businesses closer to their shareholders after realising traditional approaches to investor communications were clunky.

“Things have not really transitioned away from analogue in terms of how listed companies raise capital,” Ben said.

The duo noticed that Australian public companies faced two major challenges that could stand in the way of their future growth.

Companies often didn’t know where their next injection of capital was coming from, and they were overly reliant on very expensive third parties like brokers when raising cash.

“This approach often gave a pretty bad return on investment, and just left companies out of control,” Rhys said.

Secondly, while most companies were good at keeping their top 20 largest shareholders in the loop, they often neglected to form connections with retail investors who own a smaller stake in the business.

This was despite this group of shareholders having an increasing influence on share prices and being more likely to trade a stock.

Many of these retail shareholders were already building their own digital communities.

“It’s actually retail investors who are gathering online, talking to each other, finding the things they like and buying into those things that is really determining the share prices of many companies,” Rhys said.

Ben and Rhys workshopped these problems for several years and came up with a range of business solutions, including Fresh Equities, which connected investors with listed companies raising capital.

In 2022 they launched InvestorHub, a platform that, whether the task is investor communication or raising capital, allows public companies to directly engage investors.

Over the past two years InvestorHub has welcomed 115 businesses on to the platform, including 15 from the United Kingdom.

Rhys says that one of the most rewarding parts of the story so far has been helping companies save serious money when embarking on capital raises.

“They’ve found they’ve now got a high conviction base of shareholders who is willing to support them. And that’s saving them literally hundreds of thousands of dollars a year,” he said.

Made in Melbourne

The company’s journey began at Melbourne’s startup hub Stone & Chalk, where Ben and Rhys met many people who would go on to have an impact on InvestorHub’s growth.

It soon became clear that InvestorHub could access a significant pool of startup talent and experience across the city.

“Suddenly we were around a whole bunch of other fintech founders and some of the people we met there ended up coming and working for the business,” Ben said.

“We also met some of our initial seed investors there.”

Learning from the best

Over the past couple of years, InvestorHub says it has helped listed companies engage over 500,000 investors, but the team is just getting started.

The founders are hoping to expand beyond Australian shores to chase growth in the UK, US and Europe.

As they prepare for the company’s next stage of growth, they’re seeking out insights from other high-performing scale ups.

InvestorHub completed LaunchVic’s 30X30 program for scale-ups earlier this year, having previously completed the EM Advisory accelerator program.

Ben and Rhys entered 30X30 wanting exposure to top-performing businesses to learn how they were managing periods of fast growth.

“The only way to really do that is to find the other best players and get in a room with them and say, ‘how do you do this?’” Rhys said.

Spending time with other scale-ups has helped InvestorHub think about how to maintain a strong company culture as it rapidly expands.

“That’s the really big challenge – how do you maintain this high performing machine that you built when there were just ten of you in the room?” Rhys said.

The business is on track to grow from around 30 staff at the start of 2024 to 50 employees in 2025.

Through 30X30, the company also gained honest insights from mentors about the realities of expanding offshore, which has helped the co-founders prepare for a difficult but rewarding path ahead.

“You actually got to hear from individuals who have spent three years and made five mistakes expanding into the US market. This helps highlight how risky international expansion is,” Ben said.

InvestorHub has already launched in the UK and will soon tackle the US and Europe.