Crowdinvesting: Challenges of Market Development (MIR (Modernization Innovation Research))

Summary

• Crowdinvesting was legally established in Russia in 2020 as a digital mechanism for early-stage companies to raise equity financing from external investors.p.2
• The national economic target requires stock market capitalization to reach 66% of Gross Domestic Product by 2030, increasing the need for pre-IPO equity funnels.p.2
• The research analyzed 160 platform transactions and performed structural analysis on 88 crowdinvesting deals involving at least 3 investors.p.5
• The Bank of Russia registered 90 crowdinvesting transactions within the small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) segment in 2024.p.6
• Average investor checks vary dramatically by platform focus, ranging from 107,600 rubles on retail-oriented platforms to 135.6 million rubles on platforms handling intra-corporate deals.p.8
• Only 36 out of 101 registered investment platform operators in Russia currently include rules for issuing equity securities in their operating frameworks.p.10

Key insights

1. The Russian crowdinvesting market contracted by 22% in 2023 following a 2.7 times surge in 2022 that was driven by intra-corporate transaction volume.p.6
2. The proportion of active legal entities and individual entrepreneurs among active platform investors expanded from 3.5% in mid-2023 to 10.4% in mid-2025.p.7
3. Total registered investors across crowdplatforms grew 2.3 times over a two-year observation period.p.7
4. Annual reporting from major crowdinvesting platforms identified roughly 4.2 thousand active investors in 2024, representing about 11% of active crowdfunding market participants.p.8
5. Issuer deals segment into seed-stage B2C services targeting about 10 million rubles, high-tech B2B ventures raising 150–300 million rubles, and traditional business expansion projects.p.9
6. Platform operational structures split between registrar-affiliated platforms focused on intra-group equity transfers and independent platforms targeting public retail raises.p.10
7. The emergence of exchange OTC solutions like MOEX.start, which accesses over 943 thousand qualified investors, creates competitive pressure on late-stage pre-IPO crowdinvesting.p.12