Roundtable raises funding round on Roundtable

The French startup Roundtable has raised 3.2 million dollars (3 million euros) from a hundred business angels. It’s a pretty large group of individual investors, but that’s because Roundtable runs an angel investment platform for European startups. Backed by eFounders, the company takes care of the administrative, legal and financial processes related to start-up investments.

Roundtable is not the first investment platform focused on startup investments. In particular, AngelList popularized the concept of group investments with AngelList Syndicates. Essentially, an angel investor brings an investment opportunity to the platform and other angels can follow the lead angel on a case-by-case basis.

AngelList isn’t the only company making startup investments easy. For example, in the UK, Seedrs and Odin also run fundraising deals for startups.

Roundtable focuses specifically on European startups and works especially well for startups based in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. When investors want to buy shares in a startup, Roundtable sets up an ad hoc vehicle (SPV) based in France or Luxembourg. The angel who is in charge of the SPV can decide to allocate interests carried by other investors in the vehicle.

The platform currently charges 1% of the amount raised by the vehicle with a minimum of €5,000 and a maximum of €15,000. There are also fees associated with secondary sales. So far, the company’s first few months have gone pretty well, as Roundtable has already processed over 100 transactions. It represents 50 million euros of assets under administration.

Due to the social features of the platform, influential angels offer offers and leverage their networks to increase the amounts raised. Some of the most active angels on the platform include Roxanne Varza who created a community of female business angels, Pieter-Jan Bouten in the Belgian tech ecosystem, Christopher Zemina in the Germany/Austria region, Aircall co-founder Olivier Pailhes in Spain, Paul Le, etc.

Many of these angels have invested in Roundtable itself. And there’s already been an outflow for an investment in the roundtable — space tug startup Launcher has been acquired by Vast (see TechCrunch’s coverage of the deal).

All in all, it’s not the biggest funding round of the year. But I’m sure the roundtable will increasingly feature in investment conversations in the future.