Case study: An out of this world campaign 🌎 🚀

‘With a vision to help make space more available by letting everyday investors join our journey, crowdfunding felt the natural route for our financing strategy. We have now completed three successful equity crowdfunding rounds and are proud to say our company has been fully funded by crowdfunding’

 Orbital Machines specialises in critical components for the commercial rocket industry, with electric propellant pumps as their benchmark product. Their purpose is to use standardisation and economics of scale to reduce the cost and risk of developing and operating a small launch vehicle (used to launch smallsats into orbit).   

They believe they have crowdfunding in their blood, and founded the company as a spin-out from Copenhagen Suborbitals, the world's only crowdfunded space programme. 

You've crowdfunded before, so what made you decide to use a support partner to help you prepare for this round? 

We were a bit doubtful of the need of using a support partner, as we've previously successfully done two smaller crowdfunding rounds in our past - basically on our own. For this round, we intended to raise a larger amount than those, and we thought a copy/paste strategy based on our previous successes would do the trick. However, when we started talking with ISQ and digging into their available tools and work methods, we quickly realised they had a lot of knowledge, tools and strategies that we had never even thought of before. We realised a combination of our experience and ISQ's support would be killer for a successful round at scale, and it worked!

What were the key challenges you encountered this time around? 

We had lead investment pre-confirmed from our pool of existing investors. We had heard there was a myth of investors not re-investing in a company, which is something we've thankfully experienced the opposite of. One of the key challenges was to engage these people and our wider crowd in advance, to raise interest in our upcoming raise. The more momentum of pre-interest you get, the more successful your crowdfunding will be. This is sometimes challenging as some investors will wait until your launch date to actively engage.

How were you supported in meeting those challenges? 

ISQ had some amazing tools for approaching our network, and everything was so detailed and structured which made the advice easy to follow. With ISQ's support we knew exactly what to do, and when to do it, in the correct order - enabling us to create momentum in the lead up to our campaign. Their strengths certainly lie in their experience and knowledge, the adaptable and detailed plan they provide you with for creating momentum, and of course the one-on-one support & access to highly competent and experienced people to talk through any of your problems with.

We would absolutely recommend ISQ to other companies looking for funding.  The adaptable "How to crowdfund" methodology is crucial for any company, even for us with previous experience from crowdfunding rounds in the past. We learned a lot which was crucial for our round and why we feel we reached over half a million euros on Seedrs! 

During this round, we learned a lot about investor behaviour in various stages of the crowdfunding campaign. We’d certainly crowdfund again, as we said - it’s in our blood! 

What's next? 

This successful round of funding has taken us from a prototype phase, to being fully established in the market. We’ve engaged with some very valuable development and customer contracts. We can’t wait to see where this round, and subsequent funding will take us.

You can check out Orbital Machine's successful crowdfunding campaign here on Seedrs.