Eat My Lunch raises $800k of debt
This concludes the first p2p lending campaign PledgeMe has run.
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Hawke’s Bay
Social enterprise Eat My Lunch has raised $802,000 from 256 investors through a debt crowdfunding campaign on PledgeMe.
The company – which delivers one packed lunch to a child at a low decile school for every one a customer buys – aimed to raise between $500,000 and $1 million through issuing bonds.
For every $1000 lent, lenders could choose between 6% interest plus a lunch given to a child each month, or zero interest and two monthly lunches given.
The debt raised will be used to launch in Wellington – it currently operates in Auckland and Hamilton – and improve its technology.
“We are heavily reliant on manual processes at the moment to organise ordering and logistics, so we think with a more robust technical platform we’ll be able to scale and service more cities and towns,” Eat My Lunch founder Lisa King says.
The year-old company, which has top chef Michael Meredith on the team, has given more than 200,000 lunches to hungry schoolkids. This year it expects to make 500,000 and give 250,000.
Its financial documents show it made net profit of $155,000 on revenue of $2.7 million this year and expects to make net profit of $328,000 on revenue of $4.7 million in 2017.
It has to repay the debt within five years, through twice-yearly payments.
This is the first debt raising campaign run by PledgeMe, which was approved as a peer-to-peer lender by the Financial Markets Authority in April, and also offers equity crowdfunding and project crowdfunding.
Eat My Lunch also ran a crowdfunding campaign (not for equity) through PledgeMe in August last year.
About 2500 pledgers gave almost $130,000 to set up the company’s commercial kitchen.
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Calida Smylie
Fri, 15 Jul 2016
Fri, 15 Jul 2016
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Eat My Lunch raises $800k of debt
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