NEWS & NOTES
📊 Your Portfolio Just Got an Upgrade
We’ve launched major improvements to My Portfolio that make it easier to keep tabs on your startup investments in one place. You can now automatically import investments from Wefunder, StartEngine, Republic, or CSV and see their estimated value based on the latest available data, giving you a clearer picture of your portfolio after you invest.
🪙 SEC Proposes “Regulation Crypto Assets”
The SEC has proposed Regulation Crypto Assets, its first offering regime built specifically for crypto, and it borrows from exemptions we already track. There is a $5 million startup lane that closely echoes Reg CF in scale, and a larger fundraising lane of up to $75 million that the SEC explicitly says is modeled in part on Reg A. It also raises a pointed question for our world, since a crypto project could raise money with far fewer strings than a small business doing the same $5 million under Reg CF. Nothing is final, and comments are open through October 20, but this is a story we are following closely. Here is our quick take on what it says and what it could mean.
🔬Upcoming Investor Research Study
Kingscrowd is partnering with researchers from the University of Notre Dame and the University of Pittsburgh on a study exploring how investors make decisions in equity crowdfunding. Some members of the Kingscrowd community may soon receive an invitation to participate, so keep an eye on your inbox for more details.
🎥 WEBINAR TOMORROW: An Inside Look at the Company Building the NASDAQ for the Creator Economy
Creators have built massive businesses and audiences. Now GigaStar is building the infrastructure designed to let investors participate in the revenue they generate.
Tomorrow at 11 AM CT, Kingscrowd CTO Brian Belley sits down with GigaStar CBO Scott Kitun to explore how creator revenue becomes an SEC-registered security, how GigaStar’s secondary market works, and whether the creator economy could emerge as a true investable asset class.
Join us live tomorrow and bring your questions.
CHART OF THE WEEK
By Léa Bouhelier-Gautreau | Read
Do the first two weeks of a raise matter most, or does the real money come later? Our latest analysis finds that both can be true. The first 14 days generate the strongest daily investment pace, but as raises get longer, the middle captures an increasingly larger share of total dollars. See how investor behavior changes depending on how long a raise stays open.
PITCH REVIEW 💸
By Léa Bouhelier-Gautreau | Deal Report
Brief: bluShift Aerospace
Léa’s Quick Take: Pivots make the best startup stories. Slack, Pixar, Netflix: they all changed direction before becoming the giants they are today. They make good stories because the company struggled, then changed direction, and found a better path.
bluShift Aerospace just made a radical industry pivot too. And it is not an obvious one. The company started by building non-toxic, climate-friendly, lower-cost rocket propulsion for space launch. Now? It is focusing on defense missiles.
But unlike Slack or YouTube, bluShift was not facing a consumer demand problem. The bigger issue was funding. Building a space launch company is extremely expensive and takes years. Then, an adviser told founder and CEO Sascha Deri that there was a major shortage of rocket motors in defense, especially around hypersonic testing. Deri understood that instead of spending years building a full launch vehicle, bluShift could start selling motors and bring revenue sooner. It could help the company build manufacturing capacity and grow the team before re-entering the space industry.
bluShift Aerospace is a company we are actively reviewing for Kingscrowd Capital’s Outperform Fund. I had extensive conversations with Sascha Deri as part of the diligence process and dug deep into the market, competition, financing needs, and risks.
We are not at the stage of deciding whether or not to invest yet. But I have already shared my research in the report.
Here are the key points I address:
The near-term revenue projections and the long-term financing needs
How bluShift is positioned against its existing competition
Whether the current risk-reward profile makes sense for investors
Ready to go deeper on every deal?
The Pitch Review gives you a glimpse of the research available with Kingscrowd Edge. Edge members get 5-star quantitative ratings, expert-reviewed analyst reports, and portfolio tracking across every active raise, plus access to Top Deals, the highest-conviction opportunities identified by the Kingscrowd analyst team. Only a select few raises make the cut. If you're not already an Edge member, try it free for 7 days.
STAFF PICKS 🌶️
By Teddy Lyons
Frontier models have commoditized basic software engineering, so evaluating a software company shifts to “Is the code defensible” to “is there a data or other advantage” that gives a company a moat. Boxsy is a fundraising platform combining CRM, data room, fundraising workflows, and several other features. I'll be digging into whether Boxsy has a defensible data advantage, or if this software could be replicated easily on Codex or Claude.
By Léa Bouhelier-Gautreau
Sometimes solving a problem halfway is better than not solving it at all. This is what Midori-Bio is offering. Plastics emit greenhouse gases upstream as they come from fossil feedstocks and pollute downstream as they turn into microplastics and take hundreds of years to decompose. Midori-Bio is solving the second part of the problem. It is selling plastic manufacturers an additive that helps plastic biodegrade 64x+ faster. I love the solution. But a good solution doesn't always make a good investment. Before deciding to invest, I need to understand why customers would pay for the product and what the competitive landscape is.
Until next time!
Thanks for reading and for being part of the Kingscrowd community. If you found something valuable in this issue, share the newsletter with a fellow investor. We’ll see you again in two weeks.
