That’s the whole point! This is completely different than the traditional crowdfunding you get on Kickstarter and others, where you donate in exchange for a reward, perk or pre-sale of the product. When you invest in Newchip, you are buying stock in the company. Our job is to make the value of that stock go up! 

When you invest in Newchip you are buying future stock in the company (see SAFE notes). You can use this calculator to get an ROI estimate. As with any investment, it's impossible to say what will happen in the future. But we can tell you what we hope to achieve

Online investing is a massive multi-trillion dollar global industry and we believe Newchip is the sort of idea that can transform it. Investing in early stage startups is like investing in Disney back when it was just Walt and Roy, Apple in it's garage, or Amazon when it just sold books. 

However, it also holds a lot of risk with it too, you can't just "get" your money out whenever you want, sell your shares like you can on the stock market, and startups may never exit, and can completely fail!

Not in the foreseeable future. As an early stage company, all revenue from projects will go back into the business, allowing us to invest in more projects and to continue growing the value of the company overall!

Absolutely yes! Being a Newchip investor means you get...

$500+
[BRONZE] Access new features before they go live + Private investor only Facebook group + Your name and profile on our Newchip investor page + "Founding Investor" Badge on Newchip

$1,000+
[SILVER] Limited edition investor t-shirt + Thank you letter from our team! + everything from previous perks

$5,000+
[GOLD] Quarterly investor creative/brainstorming conference calls + Personalized and framed letter from our team + Limited edition investor hat and swag + everything from previous perks

$10,000+
[PLATINUM] Meet and greet with the team + Access to VIP party at closing of round + everything from previous perks.

There are a lot of platforms out there -- if you've invested on more than one, you know how hard it is to keep up with all of your investments. 

We make it simple for you to find investments you believe in across our platform network. After you've invested, our goal is to make tracking and managing your investments simple.

What differentiates us is our vision is to eventually build a new NASDAQ like exchange for private equity, fully integrate in with our partner network, and as the industry grows and regulation changes- help create liquidity for investors around the globe.

Market Size: 
The global alternative investment and finance market is expected to
exceed US$57 billion by 2022.
- Source: Statista Digital Market Outlook 2018 

Potential Customers:
There were an estimated 12 million accredited investors in the U.S. in 2016, and now the number of Americans who can invest in early stage startups and businesses via Reg A+ and Reg CF is over 200 million.

Potential Early Adopters:
Over 20 million Americans have already participated in some form of crowdfunding, raising over $5 billion.
- Source: Indiegogo & Kickstarter Statistics 

I've always been an entrepreneur. In fact, I've been a crowdfunder for over 10 years and I've always wanted to own a piece of the companies I backed. 

After about five or six years in, I realized that I really wasn't investing. I felt like I was an investor, but companies weren't delivering, there was no ROI, and no accountability. For example, I backed Occulus Rift and then it sold for $2B and I didn’t get a cent. 

So when a friend shared a business article on crowd-investing a few years back, I knew I want to be a part of this industry. I knew I wanted to build a new market. I was taking a break from politics to build schools and volunteer teach in China at the time, but I found myself jumping on a plane and moving back to Austin a few days later.

I had this realization that this is what I want to do with my life. I came home, sold my sports car, my house, sold everything, and put my all into this company. I even lived in the office for the first couple of months. I AirBnB-ed my apartment just to pay the rent and we did whatever it took to get off the ground.

When I met Travis, he'd been doing crowdfunding for as long as me, if not longer. We realized what we needed to do was create an aggregator model. If we put as many deals in one place as possible and made it easy to show and compare investments, people would invest more and do so intelligently. We compared it to Trivago, Priceline, and Hotels.com and it made sense.

Our goal was to save on the margins platforms spend on diligence, on-boarding, and all the man hours and work that goes into getting deals listed. As engineers we wanted to automate and streamline everything. 

We believed that if we automated enough, that we could build our platform just around marketing the deals online and connecting investors to platform partners. 

That's how Newchip was born.

We didn't even dream about the exchange at first, it was something our users said they wanted and we're listening. 

It's a tough thing building a new market. I talked to different platforms, and a lot of CEOs were nervous. I thought to myself no matter how many users we have in the future, it's gonna be hard to build an exchange because we need access to other users. You need a mass traction volume of users and interoperability between different platforms. 

But the NASDAQ didn't start off as a monopoly and thats where we learned. There was a lot of regional exchanges, kind of like where we are with crowdfunding right now with different platforms. 

So we believe that if we can create an underlying technical exchange infrastructure, we can enable everyone to work together to build this market, and we'll all be successful.

There are a few reasons. In the beginning, we didn't believe we had the experience. At that point, we didn't have Judd onboard. He joined the team after a few months. 

Travis had worked in the financial technology side, and I had been in the regulatory side, but we didn't feel like we had the investor background or the due diligence experience. We were really good engineers though, so we figured we could let platforms find the companies, and we could market the deals. Basically our partners do the on-boarding and then plug everything into one system on our end to connect to investors.

We were also late to the game and we didn't want to compete with 50+ platforms. We saw there was a bigger problem that the entire industry was facing, and that was the cost of investor acquisition. We wanted to find a way to connect investors and help out our partners. We believe this industry will grow no matter what, but we wanted to focus on this one piece to help this industry grow faster. 

We saw ourselves as nitroglycerin or dynamite to the market. We thought if we can do this and own it, we can provide a lot of value to platforms around the nation.

It's crazy but there are new ones that launching every month, and there's going to be even more platforms launching over the next 12 months.

Our biggest risks are regulatory changes and platform and company failures in our market. That's the kind of stuff we can't predict or help, but we are optimistic because the regulators and Congress have all been extremely positive about this market.

If there is a 2008 recession, we we would likely be affected too because when people aren't spending or investing, that hurts the entire financial sector. 

The positive thing is that these are all long term investments, which means they are not as affected by temporary market fluctuations or changes. 

We believe in this market, and we hope you will too. There are risks though, and if you aren't comfortable with the risk, you shouldn't invest.

We don't say anything is the best. We say it’s the best for you based on your interests and preferences. Everything we do is driven by user interest and preferences. 

Some investors only invest in debt offerings. Some only invest in restaurants, bars, or apps. We try to hone in on cues for those investors and try to provide only that. Even though you come to Newchip and you can see everything at once, we want to connect users and investors to only the things they're interested in without actually having an RIA and recommending them or controlling what they invest in.

Some platforms spit out the same deal every day or every week to their users. There's no personalization to it. A lot of our users don't like that. We live in a world where people expect things to be personalized. That's one of the reasons our conversion rate and our acquisition rate are so good.

We try our best, and we're going to continue to add new things. Our search engine uses machine learning. We will need more data points to get better, but over time we want to make it so so that when a user registers with us, they answer a few questions, and we'll be able to connect them to investment opportunities tailored to them.

Indiegogo and Kickstarter are two out of 2,000+ crowdfunding platforms. There's going to be a lot of niche platforms in equity crowdfunding or what we call crowd investing as well--there will be ones connected with VCs and with angel investors, and I think they're all going to be very specific to a general niche or geographic location.

It’s still always going to be a little hard to scale over time as an industry so long as there is regulatory requirements on companies. It depends on the regulatory environment and everything around it, but I know that's one of the hardest things to scale. 

On the investor side, it's a balancing act between investors and number of deals. I see us as this middle frame for the market to be an integrated infrastructure for all the different platforms we want to offer in different technologies over time. We have a platform dashboard to offer platforms so they can track their own data versus competitors. I believe in a transparent kind of open market where everyone's working to build a better market ecosystem. We're all trying to help the end investor and the entrepreneur connect.

Five years from now, I see us as a major partner for all the different platforms and across other industries too. I don't ever see us being 100 percent of all user market volume, but I see us being 20 or 25 percent of the volume going to different deals and partners. 

I see us becoming like creditcards.com, where people come and compare offers and investments instead. We're really an affordable channel compared to Facebook and Google AdWords. There's a lot of value in the data side and public equity markets, and some of the big investors. We've already lined up investors on the larger side from bigger banks and institutions that are interested in our next few rounds. They all see the value in some kind of aggregator marketplace and not having to be so focused on the core broker-dealer side.

The core of it is connecting capital, changing the system, and creating something new to become the one place that an investor can go across the ecosystem and experience what they can invest in, and they have a community of other investors that they can connect with.

We want to create that community experience where everybody can come together as an investor and support various entrepreneurs across the country and world.

Right now, we're generating revenue from different partnerships through a CPA and CPC type models. We recently launched cost-per-registered -user charging and cost-per-click on some deals. 

Some of our affiliate deals pay us a specific fee for listing every month between $2,000 and $5,000 deal. There's a bigger charge there because we do more for those companies.

We're also launching several innovative revenue streams with payment processors and affiliate partners across the financial sector.

In the future we likely plan to launch a commission and success based model with split equity and cash percentages with our partners. There are specific license requirements for those but we've already lined up partners willing to pay 50% commission for our investors.

We pay around two dollars per user. That's kind of average across the board. We use Facebook advertising, Twitter, and we have referral networks we work with like Google AdWords. 

AdWords is probably our most expensive channel. We don't do too much on that yet. We're working to improve it. We're app-based, so that's the majority of our user flow. That's where our users are most affordable and we then encourage them to web from mobile.

In terms of registration rates, we average around 70 percent, and about a 15 percent to 20 percent conversion rate. It varies across all of our partner platforms and types of deals. 

Some platforms convert very well, and some do not. Some deals do very well. For example, SeedInvest may not have nearly as many deals as other platforms, but they have a higher conversion rate than some larger platforms to our user-base. There are really basic things to such as, Nextseed right now has only three live deals and they do below average because most of their deals don't have videos. 

Investors are very particular but especially the 25-35 audience as they require more than just numbers and some pictures, they want to see a video pitch and want to resonate with the founders.

The average investment our users invest is about $1,500. That's including accredited investors. Without credit investors, it's anything from about $300 to $600.

Two KPIs are the most important to us and we track to the most granular levels possible.

On the high level though that's total user accounts and active monthly users. You can't have one without the other. Those are what we're most successful at. It’s one of the reasons we were ranked in the top 100's in the App Store for Finance and able to rank there with 50k users versus other companies in the same ranking with tens of millions.

One differentiator is our users are highly engaged compared to other finance apps. Our users love coming back, using the Tinder touch swipe features, and watching deals progress. Typically, 80 percent of the users only come back to look for stuff and shop and around 20 percent might convert. But over time, these people can eventually find something they really like and invest in those companies.

We just started generating revenue in the last few months. In 2016, we didn't generate any revenue. We didn't even have any partnerships. We were just trying to build something that worked and get people to believe in the industry.

We just started really scaling up users, partnerships, and integrations last month. I believe we did around $8,000 last month, and this month, I believe we're going to do $15,000. We'll aiming to double it again next month. That's just on our affiliate side. Once we have our other licenses and things in place, we expect to hit around $1.5 million in revenue.

On the affiliate side for us, we have 10 companies. We expect to double that every month. For every company, it's around $2,000 to $5,000. Next month, we'll probably have at least 20 affiliate deals. These companies are on a subscription paying month to month. They pay flat fees for that. We provide a significant amount of user flow to them, more so even to our regular partners. We expect by the end of the year to have at least fifty or sixty companies. That revenue stream alone will be significant.

There's always going to be a balance between community and platforms and there's always going to be a little bit of push and pull over who does what better. Education and community are probably the two deciding factors between 30 and 80 percent of users investing. We try to be super data-focused and not so much on a high level. The more serious financial investor can find really specific report data, financials, and things like that. We're testing that right now. It doesn't resonate that well with our non-accredited investors, but it does resonate with the acccredited investors.

We don't want to be a deal discussion forum as thats limited to platform only areas. We want to be the forum for people who’ve invested in six or seven companies and want to talk with other investors in the same companies connect. So if you invested in a company, you can talk to other people who have already invested in the company after it’s closing.

We also show users comparable companies to ones they’re investing with. It’s one of our most popular features. If you like this one brewery, we’ll find six other breweries and compare the valuations they raised at to help you become educated. 

We’ll compare the data, the investment info, and most importantly, the secondary market data. In terms of platform evolution and where we are today, there's not going to be much more of a differentiation moving forward from where it is besides more integration and increasing education. Step one is heavy integration to make it easy to invest and connect to other deals on other platforms. We’ll have that data on a high level on the Newchip dashboard. After that, it’s just a secondary market. Whatever the pricing is, we’ll be able to track all the data across the industry and be a repository for that. That's our big set of features and that's where all of our focus would be. 

We've got this platform working, we know this works, we know this provides the users and the investor referrals. What we don't want is to lose those to platforms, like if someone comes to us and then goes to Wefunder, then stays put and never comes back. We want to add some value that the platforms don't have the ability to offer or that they don't want to offer. We're all trying to do too many things at one time so we're figuring out what we can really focus on and be really good at.

I'm most excited that we're launching a new education initiative. We haven't yet seen anyone get it exactly right. We're trying to figure out a way to outsource what we can but work with serious and experienced leaders. We plan to work with education content providers and provide some kind of network where people will want to talk and work together on things. It's going to be difficult, but that covers the next two to three years in terms of product development.

On this product, we're continuing to integrate it in some community features, but really the secondary market integration is going to be the biggest change in the next year. We've been waiting to get that out there. To do that, you need tons of traffic. We need to have 150,000 to 200,000 users to even get it going. We're really focused on adding that service to platforms as, okay, great, someone invested in your deal on this platform now you can use our integration and our technology on the secondary market side. We plan to work together on it and do some kind of split commission and whatever future licenses might allow. Regardless, we see ourselves as the software solution on the backend.

There are two or three companies that are kind of trying to do something similar to us. But nobody has the technology background, or raised enough capital to be serious. That’s the biggest obstructions to them being true competitors. A platform could always become a broker-dealer and try to compete with us too, but I think we probably have too much value. We're never going to step on a platform area. We don't want to list deals directly nor have too much regulatory tape either. We don't have that skill set. We don't want to do that ever. We just want to work with the best platforms and help educated investors. 

I think it's the same thing on the platform's end. Anyone that tries to would be biting off more than they can chew. This marketplace is already tough enough to try and find deals and investors in. It's like any ecosystem, and it's going to evolve. 

We'll be a service provider that's really good at what we do. There's also room for competition. With 300 million Americans, there's always need for competition, and those competitors will help educate the market. This market won't become saturated for five to ten years. It's still really small, but growth is key. 

It's comparable to regular crowdfunding. What will happen is you'll see the regular crowdfunding go down over time and company-based crowdfunding become equity crowdfunding. Indiegogo and Kickstarter have been losing market share. It’s not so much a change in the market as it is a change in interest. 

The crowd's been abused sometimes, which is a little bit of a negative, but it's also a positive spin for platforms and us to bring a "better version of crowdfunding". We're not just going to show you some fancy video and say it's great, give us money. There's got to be some kind of depth to these companies and real tangible value props to the world.

There's one called Crowd Circus that’s a European aggregator for all crowdfunding. But they have no monetary scheme. They have no search algorithms. It's just a big mess. Aggregation only works if it's for a very specific purpose. The only reason we aggregate and the only reason we will ever aggregate is to find very specialized segments and provide those to people who want them. If you just collect a bunch of data and throw it in a big box, nobody's going to care about it. Even if it's sorted by a couple of basic functions, like most funded or top trending, it’s still going to be hard for people to sort through. People want to be able to drill down into what they care about. That's the most important feature other aggregators are lacking.

It’s also about the monetization. Indiegogo and Kickstarter have gotten so big and there's so much deal flow that it's really hard for people to connect to what they want. Their search algorithm is still the same as it was several years ago a basic search box. 

I can't really drill stuff down like I should be able to to find exactly what I want and to be able to put money behind it. That's a core differentiator. Their model is to get companies to bring all their users into the market and platforms do that too, but there's never been anyone trying to monetize that. 

There's a lot of small deals. I expect a lot of these deals in the equity crowdfunding space to grow over time and become much larger. Platforms can't survive off $30-$50k deals, it cost too much and cost too much on the companies regulatory burden and cash wise. 

We need to see some really great companies get a lot of funding and get a lot of traction for it to be a sustainable model but we are seeing that growth right now, and this is the opportunity to be a part of it.

I'm worried about partners or platforms choosing to skirt the law and or list deals without diligence. I'm worried about a "rogue" player making the industry look bad, or seeing deals listed that we think are not fundable and scams. 

We often take down deals that we think are not fundable, or that we’re morally opposed to. For example, we don't list "weapon" investments on our platform. We might change that in the future, but today we believe thats where we should be.

We rely on partners for a lot, and that's also our biggest weakness. Most people don't know that Amazon's an aggregator. Amazon aggregates a bunch of different stores into one place. I see that as the future of this industry too. That's a challenge, and that's a weakness, and that's a fear as there is so much uncertainty around it all.

The regulatory climate might not go the way we want to. It might grow too fast, or too slow. Additional regulatory changes are needed to increase the cap to $5M for most tech companies. The market also might get dominated by crypto, it might take over the whole market volume-wise in Reg A+ and you can't just overwhelm a market. It will make it really expensive for all of us to do advertising but we will survive and pivot if that is what it takes.

It's all looking really positive, though in my opinion. The growth is positive, the feedback is positive, the synergy with the platforms has been tremendous. The biggest concern has to be a platform going rogue, not following the law, and causing a problem for everyone else. 

That's part of the value we offer. People can find deals from quality platforms when they go to Newchip. We vet our platforms to the best of our ability. We don't partner with just any platform that emails us and we are in this to protect our users. Although with that, we don't do diligence ourselves on deals. Thats always on the user/investor.

We plan to use the funds we raise for marketing and hiring additional engineers, and building up our team over the rest of the year. 

We have a small engineering team here now, but we need to hire more. We also need to increase our marketing spending and hire in house marketers. 

That's what's going to differentiate us. We want to be able to get the highest number of users in the quickest way and help partners the fastest. That's not just the venture capital model, but how we're going to help the industry. 

We also plan to do what most companies forget to or are not able to do- use this capital to increase our own revenue generation. That's critically important at this stage and we plan to utilize it to help generate significant revenue. 

Travis: I'm co-founder and Chief Technology Officer. I've been working with startups for over 20 years. I have about five years of experiences in cyber security consulting for the top companies in the world. I also bootstrapped a company here in Austin to an Inc. Top 500- 21st place. We were the fastest growing private company in Austin in 2012. 

My background is in large-scale enterprise online solutions and Fortune 50 enterprise systems architecture. My heart and my passion are to helping early stage entrepreneurs and fixing the funding gap for them that stifles innovation. There is such a disconnect between entrepreneurs that know what they are doing but don't have the network to raise and those that have a strong network but don't know what they're doing. I've seen so much money squandered in the wrong hands, and I've seen great ideas and companies die because they ran out of capital. I think that's a real tragedy.

Ryan Rafols: We've got a great team overall. Judd launched the first business crowdfunding platform in the industry and now we're just adding new technology, new innovation, a bigger team, and we're bringing it to everyone. 

I'm personally heavily experienced on the regulatory side as well as creative design, and engineering. Travis has built large-scale teams and products with Fortune 500 as well as IPO'd a company in the 2000's. 

All of that experience and our shared vision is why we work well together. There's a lot of age difference, but we all come from the same background of hustle, entrepreneurship, and work hard-stay humble attitudes.

Judd Hollas: I helped found this entire industry and have always felt that it was un-American that the everyday people were not allowed to invest in early-stage companies. When the laws were first announced, I became extremely excited about the potential and how it'd change this market. I felt like the power of the people to support smaller companies and good ideas, versus just the wealthy investors being able to pick and choose what they felt would make the most capital, versus doing the most good was causing a lot of problems in this world. 

I started the first business crowdfunding platform in America and helped take it all the way to an acquisition. When I met Travis and Ryan, I realized we could do it again but not just for the wealthy but make it more popular than E*Trade and as much a household name as NASDAQ. I've been doing this my whole life and everything has led up to this moment here with my team at Newchip. We're going to make this a success.