More than 370 eager chocolate-lovers invested in Dunedin’s Ocho Chocolate on the first day of its capital raise.
Yesterday morning, Ocho launched it second crowdfunding campaign on PledgeMe in a bid to raise $500,000 in capital.
Before it opened some of the company’s existing shareholders had already committed about $250,000.
The raise went live at 9.30am and quickly reached its minimum target of $300,000 before 10am.
By late afternoon $333,800 had been invested by 378 people.
Existing shareholders had invested about $1000 each and the average pledge from the platform yesterday was about $500.
The company was thrilled with the campaign’s start, managing director Jim O’Malley said.
The existing shareholders’ significant investment in the campaign before it started gave the company confidence it had their backing, he said
The Dunedin company’s first crowdfunding campaign took place in 2017 after news the city’s Cadbury factory would close — it raised $2million in 32 hours.
This raise was not expected to be finished within 32 hours but he believed with about $80,000 a day invested it could be finished in three or four days, Dr O’Malley said.
The campaign was expected to see a boost last night as people got home from work and again this morning.
The funds were going to be used for new equipment and improvements to packaging, and $170,000 was earmarked to help move into the Auckland market.
About $150,000 was being set aside for capital running costs as well, of which the company expected to use only about $50,000, but Ocho wanted to put ‘‘a nice buffer around it’’, Dr O’Malley said.
The campaign would not close oversubscribed because the firm did not want to dilute existing holdings too much, he said.
He did not expect the company would need to do another capital raise after this, Dr O’Malley said.
"We believe that should be enough to do it and this company will capitalise on $2.5million, which is a pretty small capitalisation," he said.
The crowdfunding campaign is open until the end of the month.
