3i Business Case

We, 3i, are expert across all funding stages, from start-ups to buyouts. We consist of 2 teams, the venture capital team and the growth capital team. The first is the one who focuses on start-up and early-stage companies, like GenAppeal. Our funding requirements are in the range of €1m to €5m.

We first talked to entrepreneurial team 9. They needed € 900.000, which is not a problem for us since we can easily offer a lot more. Nevertheless, we prefer to invest more than €1.000.000 in a start-up company. We agreed that GenAppeal has to focus more on older people. Their other ideas were also similar to ours, except that they want to focus only on Belgium in the first year. Their WACC was also very high (50%).

Entrepreneurial team 8 could be our perfect match if only they needed more funding. They needed €790.000 which is not within our range. We especially liked their idea about offline expanding. They want to do all sorts of events. Like organizing dinner parties, offering cheaper cinema tickets if you go with members of the dating site. With those events they want to encourage people to meet faster in real life. Another thing we like is their second product. It is an application where you can check who watched your profile, how many times etc. They really focus on enlarging their marketing strategy which can result in expanding faster than planned.

The next team we negotiated with, was entrepreneurial team 3. A lot of topics were quite different than ours. Some ideas we really liked, others we disliked. What we believe is interesting, is their grow strategy. They first want to penetrate the Benelux, then starting from the third or fourth year they want to expand to the rest of Europe and after this the Far East is on the planning. Their large expanding idea is a positive point because this is one of our investment requirements. Another must for us is an exceptional management team. They fulfill that need only half. The CEO is responsible for the scientific part and the