Freeflow Technologies has appealed for stretch funding to help develop its green bike prototype.

The Saltire e-bicycle features the company’s patented technology is apparently 30 per cent lighter than any other model on the market. Although it handles like a regular push bike, it’s 9kg lighter than Boris’ London bikes and it’s 90% recyclable too.

The product was thought up by founder Neil MacMartin who discovered that most of the electric-powered bikes on the market did not act like normal push bikes – they were too heavy and the mechanics were difficult to work with.

The electronic driver is fitted in the downpipe of the chassis using a high-speed small motor. When testing the technology, MacMartin found it caused problems when suddenly braking because the small motor couldn’t absorb the power.

To get around this, Freeflow designed the patented gear system, meaning the power can’t travel backwards when the brakes are applied, instantly decoupling the motor and allowing it time to slow down on its own accord. It created the lightest power to weight electric bike that looks and handles like a push bike and uses a third less material than any other electric bike.

The Saltire bike can cycle at up to 15.5mph over nine blocks without exerting any more effort than walking three blocks and can hold its charge for up to 100 miles.

One of the coolest features of the bike is that it measures data as you pedal to analyse usage trends – so whether you’re cycling cross-country or around the city, you can be as efficient as possible.

The company has stretched beyond its £195,000 target on Angels Den, so far achieving £239, 292 from 25 funders with 37 days left to go in its campaign.

The funds will be used not only to develop the product, but also to help set up licensing agreements around the world in order to boost revenues and grow the company into a global organisation.

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When you’re about to invest in a company you ask questions; you check balance sheets; you engage in due diligence, discovery and check criminal records. You meet the team. All these things are as true for investors using crowdfunding services as it ever has been, but author Dan Marom thinks these services make it even easier to make good investment decisions.

Crowdfunding wisdom

“I think crowdfunding is a crucial toolkit for an entrepreneur,” Marom, who wrote The Crowdfunding Revolution tells the Irish Times. “It’s the democratisation of entrepreneurship.”

Kickstarter isn’t the only crowdfunding site in town, he explains, there’s peer-to-peer lending, equity, donation and reward-based funding services — many of which are included within our directory of services.

While reward-based crowdfunding can be characterised as little more than buying a product in advance, equity-based crowdfunding means much more:

“It’s very popular to say it will destroy conventional venture fundraising, but my personal view is that the future lies in a synergy,” he says.

Can’t fool all the people all the time

You see, the advantage of pointing the crowd at business ideas is that it means those ideas come under far more oversight than any individual investor can possible deliver. You have a crowd of experts taking a look, rather than just the limited number that may exist inside your investment company.

“Sometimes it’s wiser to have the crowd do due diligence,” Marom notes, and while the crowd may not have complete expertise in the business it is being asked to look at, it’s a start. “It’s not easy to fool the crowd, but it could happen,” he says.

The potential positive impact of crowd-based decision making concerning new business ventures is one thing, but there’s another consideration that should please investors: In most cases the business itself has been vetted by the crowdfunding service.

Watch the line

Savvy investors already understand this, of course, which is why so many funding rounds fall around the 30 percent to 40 percent funding mark — usually around the line at which a founder’s personally aquired funds shut down. Businesses that rise above that line are potential investments for seasoned crowd investors, as achieving this means either the idea has impressed a lot of people or the people behind the idea have figured out their marketing.

There’s more in future, of course, Marom believes that it won’t be too long now until big firms begin to crowdfund ideas: “not just funding, but also crowd-sourcing new ideas and also, crowd-sourcing execution”.

Read the whole interview here.

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In perhaps the biggest signal yet that crowdfunding is becoming an incredibly viable investment play, Indiegogo CEO, Slava Rubin (above), recently suggested to CNBC that his service may enter the equity crowd funding markets in future:

“I think there is a massive market to be had if equity crowdfunding ever happens,” he said. “We are super bullish, but we have to wait and see what the regulations will be.”

Such plans would be a big step for Indiegogo. The service is already among the top three reward-based crowd funding sites. Any move to enter the equity investments space pits it against the likes of Angels Den or CrowdCube. Meanwhile, KickStarter has categorically said it has no interest in equity funding.

This seems set to change, of course, as financial regulators worldwide recognise the need to loosen up their rules to enable a wider church of individuals to make investments in innovative firms. After all, why should the potential benefits of such investments be limited to “high net worth” individuals?

“It’s a tricky balancing act, you need to look for investor protections and also make sure you allow for innovation,” Rubin said.

“What’s really interesting is that why everybody is talking about equity crowdfunding, Indiegogo has grown over 1,000 percent since the JOBS Act was signed, because there is massive demand for funding without equity,” he said.

Indiegogo plainly hopes to capitalise on any such market deregulation. “It’s a really exciting industry, the 80′s was all about desktop computing, the 90′s was all about online commerce, and the early 2000′s was all about social networking,” Rubin said. “And this decade will go down as the decade of funding by the time it’s over.”

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