How Just Move In raised £7M from over 100 investors using Agile Fundraising

Raising money from a handful of investors can be a challenge, but Just Move In had bigger plans. We helped Just Move In close over £7 million from over 100 angel and high net worth investors, using our flexible SeedFAST and Instant Investment top ups.

The elevator pitch 🚀

Just Move In is a home setup service that makes moving home manageable. They manage time-consuming and boring admin, such as informing the council, finding the best value water and gas tariffs, and searching for the best broadband deals around.

The company was founded by Tom Old and Ross Nichols after Tom had a particularly poor experience moving home. Combined with their urge to start a responsible business that benefits the planet, Just Move In (a certified B Corp) was born. It officially launched in 2018.

The challenge: Managing the legals of 100+ investors 📊

Startup founders will know that attracting early investors takes a lot of work. As well as convincing them that your business is viable, you’ll need to negotiate and go through all the legal paperwork before they sign on the dotted line. So think how complicated it could be to attract over 100 investors!

“Our strategy was to attract a large number of independent angels and high net worth investors,” says Tom Old, CEO and co-founder of Just Move In. “In fact, we have over 100 of them. So it was important that we were able to find a legal partner that was able to support that number of investors in an organised, streamlined and efficient way.”

SeedLegals was ideally suited to this task.

“It was incredibly easy to onboard our investors using SeedLegals. Take the shareholders agreements or Articles of Association, for example. You answer a few questions and the documents are automatically generated for you, taking into account all your preferences and the details of your investors. You can share them really easily. And if you make changes later on, SeedLegals will contact all the investors to notify them and ask them to re-sign – automatically. It simplifies what could be a really laborious task. It’s reflective of what we’re doing at Just Move In, actually.”

Has Tom and his team experienced any downsides of having so many investors?

“I think most people would assume that having lots of investors results in a really large and difficult-to-manage cap table,” says Tom. “But in practice, it hasn’t been a problem – at least with SeedLegals. In fact, it’s one of the reasons we chose SeedLegals. If we’d gone down the traditional route, we’d have wound up with a bulky spreadsheet that we’d have had to keep manually updated. But SeedLegals keeps it automatically updated for you, every time you make a change or bring in a new investor. It’s saved us a lot of time and hassle.”

Read more about managing a larger cap table here.

How SeedLegals helped 🌱

1. Continuing on from the last round

SeedLegals isn’t just for closing your seed round. We’ll support you through all your investment rounds, no matter how far down the alphabet your rounds go.

“Coming to our next round, we thought we might have outgrown the SeedLegals platform,” says Tom. “After all, ‘seed’ is in the name! We briefly considered using other legal firms, but after speaking with the SeedLegals team, we were pleased to learn they could continue to support us for years to come.”

One of the benefits of continuing to use SeedLegals is that all your documents are in one place.

“Because everything was already on SeedLegals, there wasn’t much setting up to do. And it was really easy to contact all our investors. It was quite a relief, to be honest!”

Keeping everything on the platform is not just helpful for the founders, but for investors too, who can see how the round is progressing and have quick access to the cap table and documents.

“It’s useful to have a central digital depository of all the documents that are attached to a round of funding. Having a digital cap table available is really useful. Investors can log in and see a clear view of their holdings.”

2. Support on-hand

For most startup founders, raising investment isn’t something they’ve done before. So while we’ve designed SeedLegals to be as simple and intuitive as possible, we also offer incredible support when you need it.

“There’s a lovely team of people at SeedLegals,” says Tom. “Can I give a shoutout? [Editor: Yes] Okay, huge thanks to Janhavi, Anna, Emma B and Aleena for all their support. I didn’t realise that there would be so much support on hand, and they all far surpassed my expectations. They did a really great job guiding us through the process and answering our questions.”

Was there anything the team couldn’t help with?

“One of the reasons we originally considered using a law firm was for the hand-holding. We assumed an online service like SeedLegals wouldn’t be so personal. But actually, SeedLegals offered all the hand-holding we needed. There was always someone available to talk to, they knew their stuff and the response times were super fast. It was really impressive.”

3. Agile/flexible fundraising

With SeedLegals, founders don’t have to just raise money using the rigid traditional approach (Seed, Series A, Series B, etc). Instead, they can use SeedFAST to raise cash ahead of a funding round, and Instant Investments to top up a previous round and add new investors when the opportunity arises.

“We used SeedFASTs to bring cash into the business as and when we needed it,” says Tom. “If we stuck to a seed round, we’d have been bound by strict timelines and completion dates.”

It’s an approach that’s proven to be very effective.

“We’ve raised over £7 million from individual investors as-and-when the opportunities came up. And while they’re completely supportive of the business, I’m not sure all of them would have been able to invest if we pinned them down to a specific deadline. So taking this agile approach to fundraising has proven really valuable.”

The impact: A focus on customers, not fundraising 🔎

Just Move In closed over £7 million from over 100 investors using agile fundraising, thanks to SeedLegals.

“We’re always open to investment opportunities,” says Tom. “So it means we’ve been able to  inject more cash into the business inbetween official rounds as we meet investors who subscribe to our vision.”

This has proved to be an effective way to fuel growth.

“The market and macro economic environment has been anything but stable over the last few years, but using the SeedLegals platform has given us the ability to adapt, keep the business well capitalised and continuously invest in the technology and infrastructure that are core to our growth and future success. It’s also allowed us to receive investment from investors when they wanted to invest and had funds available.”

And without the distraction of an impending fundraise, Tom and his team have been able to focus on what matters – their customers.

“We want every move to feel personal. So we spend a lot of time focusing on personalising our recommendations so that the experience is contextual – a renter who’s moving in a week has a different journey to a home owner who’s committed to buying a home in six months time, for example.”

Tom has a lofty goal for Just Move In, which is a registered B Corp.

“It’s important to us to solve a genuine problem – my co-founder Ross and I aren’t the kind of people who’d create a company for the sake of it. So we focus a great deal on creating a great customer experience. Sometimes we invest a little more than we have to, but we believe that delivering a great customer experience will ultimately pay off in the long run.”

We wish Tom and his team at Just Move In every success.

Check out their website here 👉Just Move In

Ready to close your funding round in record time?

Talk to one of our funding experts to see how we can help. Book a call today!