No proven product/market fit, no obvious innovation.
But $90M in funding in just 11 months!
Is this the new “WeCrashed” or am I missing something?
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Timeline:
- Aug 2021: Raised $10M seed round.
- Rest of 2021: Opened offices in London, Paris, and Krakow. Grew the team to ~200 people. Built the product.
- Jan–Feb 2022: Launched app on App Store and Google Play.
- Feb–Mar 2022: Got ~15K downloads (according to AppMagic) for their B2C product.
- Mar 2022: Raised $40M in Series A.
- May 2022: Got a spike in downloads driven primarily by paid marketing (~150K downloads).
- June 2022: Number of monthly downloads dropped to ~20K.
- July 2022: Raised $40M in Series B for expanding to more European countries.
- August 2022: Number of monthly downloads dropped to ~4K.
The company is called Shares. They want to replicate Robinhood’s success in Europe with commission-free stock trading. Focus on people who haven’t traded before. Added value: a social twist on investing (a.k.a. GameStop short squeeze, productized).
- No innovative tech.
- Very competitive and recently disrupted market. Robinhood launched 7 years ago in the U.S. Revolut and Freetrade have already replicated this approach in Europe.
- No proven product value. Based on available data, the Shares app hasn’t achieved product/market fit or found scalable and sustainable growth channels.
This gets me back to the original question.
Why are investors so bullish? Is this “WeCrashed 2.0”? What other explanation is there?
