LOVESPACE

Last updated
LOVESPACE
Website http://lovespace.co.uk
TypeStartup
FounderBrett Akker
Managing DirectorSteve Folwell

LOVESPACE offers by-the-box storage and storage unit services with collection and delivery in the United Kingdom. The company also provides packing and shipping services as well as operational and logistical support to small businesses by transporting equipment, storing archival documents and storing surplus stock. [1] [2] [3]

Contents

History

LOVESPACE was established in 2011 by cofounders Brett Akker and Carl August Ameln. Brett Akker had previously founded the carsharing company Streetcar. Carl August Ameln was the founder of City Self-Storage, a multi-national chain of self-storage centres. Ameln had previously been an investor in Streetcar. [2] [4]

A pilot service launched in 2012 and in 2013 LOVESPACE hired Steve Folwell as managing director. He was previously the director of business development and group director of strategy at the Guardian Media Group. With a focus on students, house movers and space-constrained and small businesses, the company launched a full service later that year. Steve Folwell was promoted to CEO in 2014. In 2015 LOVESPACE moved to a new warehouse in order to accommodate growth. [2] [5] [6]

Investment

Smedvig Capital [7] and First Risk Capital were initial investors. [8] Both companies have had experience in the storage industry. A 2014 fundraising campaign on the crowdfunding platform CrowdCube raised £1.55m, surpassing its £600k target to be overfunded by 167%. [9] [10]

In 2015, the company raised £1.1m in a round which was led by commercial property provider Workspace Group bringing the total funding to £4m. [11]

Related Research Articles

A startup or start-up is a company or project undertaken by an entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable business model. While entrepreneurship includes all new businesses, including self-employment and businesses that do not intend to go public, startups are new businesses that intend to grow large beyond the solo founder. At the beginning, startups face high uncertainty and have high rates of failure, but a minority of them do go on to become successful and influential.

Seed money, sometimes known as seed funding or seed capital, is a form of securities offering in which an investor invests capital in a startup company in exchange for an equity stake or convertible note stake in the company. The term seed suggests that this is a very early investment, meant to support the business until it can generate cash of its own, or until it is ready for further investments. Seed money options include friends and family funding, seed venture capital funds, angel funding, and crowdfunding.

Streetcar was the largest carsharing/car club company in the United Kingdom, established in 2004, which merged with the American company Zipcar in 2010, following a period of investment by Smedvig Capital.

Khosla Ventures is an American venture capital firm founded by Vinod Khosla, focused on early-stage companies in the Internet, computing, mobile, financial services, agriculture, healthcare and clean technology sectors. Some of its most successful investments include Affirm, DoorDash, Square, Impossible Foods and Instacart.

Pure Storage, Inc. is an American publicly traded technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, United States. It develops all-flash data storage hardware and software products. Pure Storage was founded in 2009 and developed its products in stealth mode until 2011. Afterwards, the company grew in revenues by about 50% per quarter and raised more than $470 million in venture capital funding, before going public in 2015. Initially, Pure Storage developed the software for storage controllers and used generic flash storage hardware. Pure Storage finished developing its own proprietary flash storage hardware in 2015.

Adzuna is a search engine for job advertisements. The company operates in 19 countries worldwide and the UK website aggregates job ads from several thousand sources.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Aaron Levie</span> American entrepreneur (born 1984)

Aaron Winsor Levie is an American entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and CEO of the enterprise cloud company Box.

Crowdcube is a British investment crowdfunding platform, established by Darren Westlake and Luke Lang in 2011.

uBiome Biotechnology company

uBiome, Inc. was a biotechnology company based in San Francisco that developed technology to sequence the human microbiome. Founded in 2012, the company filed for bankruptcy in 2019 following an FBI raid in an investigation over possible insurance fraud involving the US health insurance program Medicare.

Return on Change (RoC) is an equity crowdfunding platform that connects investors with innovative and socially conscious startups. Return on Change works with startups that operate in five sectors, each of which touches on sustainability in some way: cleantech, edtech, life sciences, social enterprises, and technology. An online equity crowdsourcing platform, RoC helps socially conscious ventures raise capital.

ZeroCater is a food service company headquartered in San Francisco, California, specializing in providing companies with catered meals from local restaurants, caterers, and food trucks. The company expanded its offerings in 2017 to include a fully customizable solution for office snacking called ZeroCater Snacks and Kitchens and, in 2018, to deliver alcohol with Zerocater Pours. The company launched Enterprise Catering for companies with 500 or more employees in 2019. Zerocater currently feeds thousands of employees of companies including Slack, PagerDuty, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Salesforce, JUUL, Datadog, and Cisco Meraki. As of November 2017, ZeroCater operates in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York City, Los Angeles, Austin, Washington, D.C., and Chicago.

Onevest, a New York–based investment crowdfunding site for startups that was acquired by Business Rockstars in April 2018, allowed entrepreneurs to raise capital from accredited investors. In July 2014, startups launching on Onevest had collectively raised over $66 million.

SyndicateRoom is a UK venture capital fund, headquartered in Cambridge, founded by Gonçalo de Vasconcelos and Tom Britton in September 2013. The company is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority.

Equity crowdfunding is the online offering of private company securities to a group of people for investment and therefore it is a part of the capital markets. Because equity crowdfunding involves investment into a commercial enterprise, it is often subject to securities and financial regulation. Equity crowdfunding is also referred to as crowdinvesting, investment crowdfunding, or crowd equity.

Impact Guru is a donation based crowdfunding platform for NGOs, social enterprises, startups and individuals.

Capital Match is a invoice financing platform for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Southeast Asia. Headquartered in Singapore, it operates an online platform for SMEs to seek funds from investors.

Beesfund is a Polish equity crowdfunding platform based in Warsaw, Poland. Managed by its eponymous company founded in 2012 by entrepreneur Arkadiusz Regiec, it is one of the first crowdfunding platforms in Poland, and Central and Eastern Europe. As of May 2020, 74 public offerings (issuances) were carried out on the platform, for a total amount of PLN 47M, collected by over 48,000 registered investors.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">BUX (brokerage)</span> Amsterdam-based financial services company

BUX is a European mobile brokerage company, based in Amsterdam and London. Retail investors buy shares, ETFs and cryptocurrency through the BUX app. BUX allows users CFD trading through its Stryk app and crypto trading using the BUX Crypto platform.

Securitize, Inc is a financial technology company that provides businesses a platform to raise capital from institutional, accredited or retail investors (crowdfunding) with shares issued in the form of digital tokens recorded on the blockchain, including for Oddity and digital custodian Exodus, which used the Securitize platform to raise $75 million in 2021. Securitize also operates a broker-dealer marketplace on which tokenized shares in private companies are traded. Securitize has approximately 3,000 clients with a combined 1.2 million investors and is regulated by both the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and FINRA. In June 2022, Securitize became authorized by the Spanish government to enter its securities test environment.

References

  1. "LOVESPACE". LOVESPACE. Retrieved 17 August 2015.
  2. 1 2 3 "Streetcar founder joins space race". FINANCIAL TIMES. Jonathan Moules, Enterprise Correspondent. Retrieved 17 August 2015.
  3. "Lovespace hits £1m in sales moving boxes for start-ups". The Telegraph. Rebecca Burn-Callander. Retrieved 17 August 2015.
  4. "'I put more money into Lovespace than anything else in my life' - Brett Akker, founder of Lovespace and Streetcar". ManagementToday. Rachel Savage. Retrieved 19 August 2015.
  5. "LOVESPACE Makes Room: UK's Box Storage Start-Up Overfunds on Crowdcube". Crowdfund Insider. Crowdfund Insider. Retrieved 19 August 2015.
  6. "LOVESPACE FILLS SPACE AT THE TOP". LOVESPACE. Retrieved 17 August 2015.
  7. "Smedvig Capital - LOVESPACE". Smedvig Capital. Retrieved 17 August 2015.
  8. "First Risk Capital Holdings". First Risk Capital Holdings. Retrieved 17 August 2015.
  9. "The top 15 most oversubscribed equity crowdfunding projects". RealBusiness. RealBusiness. Retrieved 18 August 2015.
  10. Wallis, Ian (June 3, 2014). "LOVESPACE closes £1.6m crowdfunding round". Startups. Startups. Retrieved 24 August 2015.
  11. "LOVESPACE takes total funding to £4m with latest investment". Startups.co.uk. Retrieved 17 August 2015.