Pictured above: Anna Guenther.
Since equity crowdfunding was given the green light in New Zealand in 2013, PledgeMe’s ‘chief bubble blower’ Anna Guenther has been one of the country’s strongest advocates for the highly successful business fundraising platform. Today her commitment to the cause has never been stronger.
It is more than a decade since Anna Guenther graced the cover of NZBusiness, and she has ticked off an impressive number of achievements since taking those initial tentative steps in New Zealand’s equity crowdfunding sector, Co-Founding PledgeMe in 2012.
“Early highlights include the first million dollars pledged on our platform. It took a year, but I still remember the celebration parties across three different bars, plus all those early fundraising successes in Wellington.”
There were standouts such as Parrotdog Brewery, which raised the statutory maximum of $2 million in a mere two days, enabling them to move into their new custom-built brewery.
Brianne West’s Ethique was PledgeMe’s first big exit. “They ran a fundraising campaign with us in 2015, and those early investors received a 48-times return when the company was sold in 2020,” recalls Anna.
She says many of the people involved in those early successes are now well-known business leaders.
Understandably, PledgeMe has become much more mainstream in the market over the years, along with Snowball Effect, the other major player in New Zealand’s crowdfunding sector.
Equity crowdfunding has become well accepted as the go-to for fast-tracking business growth.
“Generally, people today have some understanding of how it works, but there’s still a lot of education required around how to do it well,” says Anna, “and what the differences are between rewards-based and equity-based crowdfunding.”
She says that there can still be concerns around having strangers own a piece of your company. “Is there potential to lose control of your company? How do you manage those investors? But there is also power in the fact that there’s a group of people out there absolutely selling what you do,” she says.
“Look on them as your marketing arm and community arm that you wouldn’t have otherwise.”
You might think that over the past ten years more diverse ways and opportunities for Kiwi companies to raise funds would have emerged, but Anna believes that if anything the fundraising market has become tougher, especially for companies with physical products. The 2024 Young Company Finance report revealed that only a small percentage of successful raises were for non-tech companies, and most of those were for follow-on rounds.
If you’re a company with a physical product raising funds for the first time or you’re a younger founder without a physical house to mortgage, you may find fundraising a struggle.
Riding the crowdfunding bandwagon
Ten-plus years of equity crowdfunding has produced a long list of success stories for PledgeMe, and Anna is proud of all of them. Medicinal cannabis is one market sector that has particularly stood out, with Hikurangi’s investment company Waiapu Investments managing to crash the PledgeMe platform twice as it raised the statutory $2 million in a mere ten minutes.
While the cap for raising finance on crowdfunding sites like PledgeMe is likely to remain at $2 million for some time, one aspect of the sector Anna and her team would like to see changed is the requirements currently in place for public secondary trading.
“If you want to trade shares on a secondary market you must have audited accounts,” she explains. “And for lots of companies, going through that process is prohibitive.”
Anna also believes it is still hard for physical companies to fund their growth in New Zealand, especially when they’re just starting out.
“Having reviewed the Young Company Finance data last year, we found that less than seven percent of the companies funded fit in the physical product space, and 70 percent of the funding was for follow-on rounds.”
Balancing parenting with business
For the past two years Anna has been busy on a whole new adventure called parenting and is mum to two-year-old daughter Brie.
As well as raising a family, Anna has been hosting The Funding Files with Matt Stevens, Co-Founder of Parrotdog Brewery and Fractional CFO of PledgeMe – a new podcast on Spotify and Apple designed to help fledgling business owners hear stories about how other people have funded their businesses.
“As well as hearing about their personal fundraising journeys we focus on the highs, the lows and the cashflows of growing a business in Aotearoa New Zealand,” says Anna.
“Matt is the accounting brain and I’m the marketing brain.”
Funding advice for business newbies
For people looking to launch a business in 2025 Anna has some useful advice.
“Think about the amount of funding needed to make the business happen. If it’s something you can fund yourself, then do that to begin with so you can get some early traction and momentum before you need to think about fundraising.
“But if you’re at that early stage and need some cash, then consider a rewards-based crowdfunding campaign to do the marketing, build a community and get the cash to deliver the first batch of product or services.
“That can be a really good way to validate what you’re doing, generate that early buy-in and begin building a community around you.”
One company doing just that is Auld Farm Distillery in Southland – a sheep and cropping farm about to release its first single-malt whisky.
“The owners have been farming the land for more than 100 years and are endeavouring to create new revenue streams and business opportunities for the next generation. They have successfully crowdfunded their first bottling production run utilising the PledgeMe platform.”
Advice for life and business
Never compare how you’re feeling about something with how other people project themselves to the world, says Anna. “You can’t compare yourself to other people and businesses, you’ve simply got to do things your own way.”
She says despite it being harder for people of all capacities to raise capital, generally there’s still some really “cool stuff” coming through. One of her absolute favourites is Brianne West’s Incrediballs, which launches in May, and promises to take the plastic-free revolution to the drinks industry thanks to its advanced new packaging.
Brianne’s whole experience raising funds for Ethique through PledgeMe in earlier days is a great example of how early momentum can then create further opportunities down the track.
It’s one of many success stories Anna is happy to share, and having now ticked off ten years in the equity crowdfunding sector, undoubtedly there’ll be many more to come.
A better way to fund fledgling businesses
Anna Guenther’s passion for the crowdfunding sector was initially sparked during her days working for NZTE, accessing finance grants for export companies. She believed there was a better way to raise funds than the obligatory filling out of forms and applying to the government of the day. She had been excited by the results being produced by US rewards-based fundraising platform Kickstarter and still believes more can be done to help fund companies in New Zealand.
“If we want to have a thriving economy with full employment then we need to fund our businesses better.”
