Fayetteville, AR, July 31, 2014 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- EquityNet (www.equitynet.com) is announcing a new partnership with UC Berkeley (www.funginstitute.berkeley.edu) to license and provide unique business crowdfunding data and enable the Program for Innovation in Entrepreneurial and Social Finance at the Coleman Fung Institute to expand its research into the new innovative crowdfunding industry.
EquityNet founder and CEO, Judd Hollas, stated, "UC Berkeley's research will prove to be invaluable to entrepreneurs, investors, and policy makers who are involved with business crowdfunding, and we are pleased that they licensed our data to assist them in that endeavor. I look forward to reviewing the results their research will produce by using EquityNet's unique crowdfunding data."
According to Dr. Richard Swart, Director of Research at the Coleman Fung Institute, "EquityNet is a large business crowdfunding platform and maintains some of the most unique data available on entrepreneur, investor, and business characteristics in the crowdfunding industry. The significant data provided by EquityNet will help our researchers immensely to analyze evolutions in access to capital by entrepreneurs and to gain new insights into crowdfunding."
UC Berkeley is conducting ongoing research into a number of issues related to finance of small businesses and is seeking to better understand and describe how factors such as age, race, and gender may affect access to capital for other than business reasons. For example, the research will address whether women and minority business owners have access to investment capital at the same rate as others and how access to capital varies geographically. With EquityNet's unique data, UC Berkeley will also be able to expand its research and published reports to answer currently unknown questions, such as the composition and trend statistics for the entrepreneurs and investors that use crowdfunding and the composition and trend statistics for the businesses that use crowdfunding in terms of location, demography, operating and funding financials, and other statistics of interest.
EquityNet operates the longest running business crowdfunding platform in the world (since 2005) and maintains the largest empirical database of business attributes in the crowdfunding domain with datasets of 300 to 500 parameters for thousands of privately-held U.S. businesses. The database consists of hundreds of historical, projected, financial, and non-financial parameters, including geographic and demographic context at the entrepreneur and company level. The database is constantly updated as new and existing businesses use EquityNet, providing both historical and current research perspectives. EquityNet also maintains statistics on other aspects of business crowdfunding, including the timing, cost, and success rates of fundraising, investor demography and preferences, and other informative market characteristics.
To view an example of EquityNet's unique business crowdfunding statistics and to learn more about EquityNet's data licensing visit: www.equitynet.com/blog/us-equity-crowdfunding-activity-infographic
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About EquityNet
EquityNet has operated the largest business crowdfunding platform since 2005. The multi-patented EquityNet platform has been used by over 40,000 individual entrepreneurs and investors, incubators, government entities, and other members of the entrepreneurial community to plan, analyze, and capitalize privately-held businesses. EquityNet provides access to thousands of investors and has helped entrepreneurs across North America raise over $240 million in equity, debt, and royalty-based capital. For more information, visit www.equitynet.com.