E-mobility: Swedish e-car reaches 63 percent of crowdfunding goal within 4 hours

10/06/2016 | Print view

A production-ready prototype ot the Swedish urban e-car of Uniti is scheduled for next year. The crowdfunding campain runs until November 15. - © Uniti — © Uniti

A production-ready prototype ot the Swedish urban e-car of Uniti is scheduled for next year. The crowdfunding campain runs until November 15.

Sweden’s first urban electric car, Uniti, yesterday launched its global equity crowdfunding round on FundedByMe with a goal to raise €500.000 for 5,1 percent ownership in the company. Uniti reached 63 percent of its investment goal from 68 crowd investors in the first four hours after launching to the public.

The Uniti crowdfunding campaign will run until November 15, 2016 and a total of 50,000 shares are available for crowd ownership – at a minimum of €500 per investment. “We decided on crowdfunding as it's the funding method that complies closest with who Uniti is as a company – open and innovative,” says founder and CEO Lewis Horne. And FundedByMe co-founder and CEO Daniel Daboczy agrees, “Uniti is pushing for change in an industry where things have been done in a certain way forever, which strongly appeals to the FundedByMe mindset of changing the status quo and allowing everyone to become a shareholder.”

Production-ready prototype in 2017

This round will provide the seed funding required for Uniti to build a production-ready prototype, which is scheduled for 2017. Uniti began as an open innovation research project at Lund University where the team studied the underlying logic of modern mobility, the core problems that need to be solved, and the emerging technologies that should form the basis of the next generation of automotive. “Our findings show that city streets don’t need to be dominated by heavy combustion engine vehicles, or even oversized electric vehicles, as they typically only carry an average of 1.2 people for short distances at low speeds,” Horne continues.

Planned licensing of core technologies

And so Uniti was created – an electric city car that is designed to match the needs of the modern urban commuter, with a light and lean construction designed to maximize the benefits of electric car technology, utilizing sustainable materials and the highest quality 'off-the-shelf' solutions from leading suppliers. Uniti’s main source of revenue in the short-term will be through licensing the core technologies to other auto manufacturers, while in the long-term it will be through the direct sale of Uniti-branded vehicles.

65,300 investors from 176 countries

FundedByMe is one of a few full-service crowdfunding platforms offering capital through equity and loans. In the past years, some 446 companies from 25 different countries have been successfully funded with more than €19,1 million. The member base is a rapidly expanding network of more than 65,300 investors from over 176 countries around the world. FundedByMe headquarters is located in Stockholm, Sweden, with a local presence in Finland, Singapore and Malaysia. (HCN)