I just got this email from Mondo:

Thank you so much for expressing your interest in our crowdfunding round today! The full £1m target was accounted for within 1 minute, 36 seconds making this the fastest crowdfunding raise in history as far as we know.

So Mondo just raised (or, more accurately, got commitments on) the £1million it was seeking to raise through Crowdcube earlier this week (before Crowdcube’s servers exploded). This was at a post-money valuation of £30m, which seems very reasonable to me given they have already moved into beta. Alongside the Crowdfunding, Passion Capital invested a further £5m, giving a total raise of £6m. [Sadly the Crowdcube prospectus is currently not available.]

Crowdfunders were able to commit to between £10 and £1,000, but I think this was a (sensible) choice of Mondo rather than a legal requirement.

That said, the speed with which this funding happened makes me wonder what valuation would have deterred these, essentially retail, investors. And my gut feeling is that they would have easily raised the same £1m at a £300m valuation, or even higher. This is worrying to me. I suspect many of the people queuing to invest will struggle to understand much of the underlying economics on this investment.

Of course Mondo, gained a great amount of valuable press coverage from this raise, That’s not going to appear on the cap table, but for everyone who successfully invested, there are surely at least 10 people on a waiting list to sign up for this bank, and another 100 people talking about it.

Maybe this investment was so hyped because it was recognised as a reasonable gamble, which it is in my opinion. I think a lot of people raising funds are going to be heading straight to crowdfunding and the floodgates are really going to open.

I suspect we’ll be headed for a bubble here over the next two years.

To be clear I think this is a good team with a great product, and a strong investment at its valuation. And I congratulate them on an ethical and super successful raise.

I’m just concerned about the hundreds of tailgaters coming from the timeshare, wine investment and landbanking sectors.