Moneybox doubles its valuation as early backers are cleared to sell

More than 26,000 speculative punters will be able to cash in some of their profits in Moneybox, the digital savings and investments platform, after it announced a near doubling of its valuation to £550 million in two years.
The company said the private investors would be able to sell up to 10 per cent of their holdings as it disclosed a £70 million share sale to two new institutional investors, Apis Global Growth Fund and Amundi.
Crowdcube, the crowdfunding platform that introduced investors to Moneybox in two funding rounds in 2020 and 2022, hailed the share sale as “the largest secondary liquidity event ever for a private company in the UK and EU by number of potential sellers”.
Crowdfunders who backed the company in 2020 stand to make 2.9 times their money while those in the 2022 round will make a 1.8 times return. At the 2022 fundraising, Moneybox was valued at a pre-money price of £298 million.
The exit arrangement is rare for crowd investors who often see employees at other private companies they back allowed to sell shares while they remain locked in. Most recently that happened with a rival fintech Revolut.
Moneybox was one of the widely subscribed investments by Crowdcube customers, with 16,700 buying £7 million of shares in 2020 and 14,400 buying £6 million worth in 2022.
Much bigger profits have been made by the venture capital firm Oxford Capital which said on Wednesday it had made 17 times its money from when it first put seed money into Moneybox in 2016.
Moneybox is the biggest provider of Lifetime Isas in the UK as well as offering cash Isas, savings products and simple investment products. It said it now has more than 1 million customers and assets under administration of £10 billion. Assets under administration have doubled from £5 billion in a year, thanks to strong client wins and existing customers saving more.
The share sale includes £5.5 million of newly issued Moneybox shares, but is mainly of existing shares to enable old investors to realise some of their profits.
Ben Stanway, the chairman and co-founder, said Moneybox was profitable and had £62 million of cash and would probably never need to raise fresh capital. However, it would be considering a liquidity event, probably sometime in 2026-28, and this may include a flotation in London.
Stanway and his co-founder Charlie Mortimer, who were schoolfriends at Charterhouse, own 20 to 25 per cent of the business. Stanway was also a co-founder of Bloom & Wild, the home-delivered flowers company. He was previously an equity analyst at Fidelity International, which owns a 20 per cent stake in Moneybox.
Stanway said Moneybox had been funded with £100 million from outside investors over nine years. “Part of this deal is to enable everyone to make a partial exit,” he added.