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Your Chance To Invest In Facebook's Favourite Apps

The allure of Seedrs, the equity crowdfunding platform, has always been a mix of excitement and fear: it offers the chance to buy shares in start-up businesses that may turn out to be stellar growth stocks – or crash and burn.

The Big App Fund, a Seedrs project launched this week by Worth Capital, is very much in that tradition. The good news is that investors get to back three potentially high-growth businesses in one go, rather than putting all their eggs into a single basket. More hair-raising is the fact that you won’t know what those businesses are when you invest.

Instead, the money is being used to fund a prize pool for the three businesses that come up trumps in a competition to design a new mobile app. Worth Capital is looking for £350,000 – the outright winner will get an investment of £150,000, with tworunners-up getting £100,000 each.

Investors in the fund must therefore hope that Worth Capital’s competition – The Big App 2014 – attracts a high standard of entry and, in particular, app designers who’ve worked out how to develop ideas with commercial appeal.

Happily, the competition is pan-European, so there’s a large pool of potential entrants. Even better, Worth Capital has signed up Facebook as a partner – it is promising to support the project with a “major targeted online advertising campaign and a big PR push”. It will also host a pitch day next month at its London headquarters for the 100 best entrants – the 10 businesses that make the shortlist will go on to the final judging event at Facebook’s head office in mid-November.

Deborah Hale, Facebook’s business marketing director in Europe, argues that the competition should excite entrepreneurs and investors alike. “The Big App Fund is a great opportunity for entrants looking for the funding and mentorship they need to get off the ground,” she says. “For the investors, the fund represents a very attractive opportunity as the competition is the ultimate filtering process.”

Jeff Lynn, the boss of Seedrs is also excited. “The Big App Fund offers private investors an ideal way to gain a slice of the action in this hugely expanding market,” he says. “The added value of an expert panel picking the best companies to invest in, the mentoring these companies will get and of course Facebook’s support in recruiting entrants and the promotion of the winners makes this a genuinely unique opportunity for investors.”

Nevertheless, there’s no denying this fund represents a leap of faith for investors. All equity-based crowdfunding requires imagination – the vision to see the potential of brand new businesses and the patience to wait for returns that may not be generated for years to come. But this fund takes that a step further, with investors asked to bet on the unknown.

On the plus side, the mobile app market is as high-growth as it gets – technology research house GartnerGartner predicts there will have been more than 300 billion downloads by 2016, while AppleApple’s App Store alone has already racked up 75 billion downloads. The sector is also attracting substantial funding from established businesses – venture capital firms put $3.5bn into mobile app businesses in 2013. Facebook’s involvement too is a reassuring factor.

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