Crowd Sourced Funding Equity Legislation Passed

Apr 3, 2017

At long last the Australian parliament has passed the legislation that will enable companies to raise capital from the public.  This is a great decision for small medium enterprises, entrepreneurs and members of the public who wish to invest into a new type of company!

The legislation indicates that the only entities which can raise money using the crowd sourced funding equity method will be an unlisted public company.  The legislation enables a proprietary limited company to be able to be converted to an unlisted public company to enable the company to then be able to raise money from the “crowd”.

Unlisted public companies will be able to:

• raise up to $5 million every 12 months
• be able to do the company must have group turnover less than $25 million and have group assets of less than $25 million

Retail investors will be able to invest up to $10,000 every 12 months into a company.  The “cooling off period” for retail investors is five days.

Sophisticated investors are not subject to any investment limit and there is no “cooling off period” for them.