6th January 2025
“At the start of 2025, our focus was on refining the platform, strengthening our business processes, and getting back to basics across every department. Over the last quarter, the team has become more forward-looking and project-driven. We’ve collaborated with our investor community to redesign the Investor Dashboard, started automating key areas such as Finance, and gained real momentum through our marketing events. There’s a genuine excitement across the business as we embrace these changes and look ahead to the opportunities the future holds.”
— Toby Wootton, CEO
As 2025 draws to a close, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on a year of meaningful progress at Crowd2Fund — a year defined by sharp focus, disciplined execution, and renewed momentum across the business.
At the start of the year, our priority was clear: build on the strong foundations of a decade-proven platform, refine our processes, and ensure every department was aligned for sustainable growth. Over the past quarter in particular, that groundwork has enabled the team to shift decisively into a more future-focused, project-driven phase.
What follows is a snapshot of the progress we’ve made — and what it means for investors, borrowers, and the wider Crowd2Fund community.
Platform & Technology: Built with Investors, Not Just For Them
A core theme of 2025 has been collaboration. We’ve worked closely with our investor community, including establishing a dedicated forum to support the redesign of the Investor Dashboard. The goal is simple: clearer visibility of investments, faster access to key information, and an experience that reflects how investors use the platform day to day.
Our updated campaign design now enables businesses to build their campaigns directly, sharing their stories with greater clarity and ease. Combined with the redesigned onboarding journey, these improvements have already delivered measurable results, driving an estimated 142% increase in direct business applications through our website.
A New Website Foundation
We’re currently developing a full website redesign focused on usability, accessibility, and clarity. Beyond aesthetics, this creates a more flexible technical foundation — allowing us to introduce new features more consistently and at pace.
Looking ahead to 2026, we’ll be reworking how performance metrics, loan data, and statistics are presented. The aim is not to oversimplify, but to make key insights easier to interpret at a glance — while preserving depth for those who want to explore the data in detail.
Modernisation of the iOS app will begin in 2026, aligned with the new website experience. We are also actively exploring development of an Android app — one of the most frequent requests from our community.
Reliability, Security & Smart Use of AI
Behind the scenes, we continue to invest heavily in infrastructure, resilience, and monitoring as platform activity grows. This includes more comprehensive real-time system monitoring, automated alerts, and faster issue detection and resolution.
AI will increasingly support — not replace — human expertise across the business. Used responsibly, it will help reduce manual processes, improve data consistency, and enable faster, better-informed decisions across areas such as repayments, monitoring, customer queries, and internal workflows.
Security and investor protection remain paramount. Throughout 2026, we will continue strengthening safeguards and monitoring frameworks to ensure a robust and trusted environment.
Deal Flow & Market Demand
Demand for working capital remains strong. UK SMEs continue to be underserved by traditional lenders, and our model offers a compelling alternative for businesses seeking growth without giving up equity.
This year, we reviewed a wide variety of businesses and successfully funded opportunities across multiple sectors.
Repeat borrowers and broker-led deals continue to play an important role in deal flow, reflecting both borrower satisfaction and confidence in our underwriting approach.
We’ve also expanded relationships with advisors, brokers, and partners — an important channel for high-quality deal origination as we scale.
Loan Book Health & Credit Discipline
Strong underwriting remains the foundation of Crowd2Fund.
“An investor participating in every loan in 2025 would have achieved a net return of 11.91% after our 1% fee. For those investing through an IFISA, the tax-free structure has further benefited the value of these returns.”
— Toby Wootton, CEO
Every deal passes through multiple quality gates, with around 15% of submissions advancing to deal opportunities—underscoring our commitment to investor protection.
Only two loans from 2025 have entered default, reflecting continued discipline in credit assessment. Throughout the year, we refined credit policy, enhanced internal analytics, and began integrating AI-assisted tools to support — not shortcut — credit decision-making.
Looking into 2026, investors can expect continued focus on credit quality, enhanced reporting, and greater transparency around loan performance.
Collections & Recoveries
Throughout 2025, and continuing into 2026, we’ve remained focused on resolving historic defaulted loans, supported by experienced debt recovery partners, solicitors, and — in complex cases — specialist investigators.
Whilst insolvency and legal processes can often be slow and externally constrained we continue to realise results - sometimes long after a loan has defaulted. An example being XXX which was a loan that moved into default in XXX. The loan had strong XXX - and after XXX resulted in XXX etc Success story?
Another example would be xxx who are paying back xx a month. This kind of arrangement delivering a return to investors after a business has found themselves in financial difficulty.
Where we feel there is no further avenue for a default loan then those historic loans are being written off and will no longer be pursued.
Finance, Automation & Returns
Since January 2025, 20 companies have fully completed their repayments, resulting in 37 closed loans and returning £1.92m in capital and £451k in interest to investors. Over the same period, 470 new investors joined the platform, strengthening participation across active portfolios. The 2025 loan portfolio is currently delivering an estimated net annualised return of approximately 12%, based on real repayment behaviour and after platform fees. We’ve also made strong progress on finance automation, improving repayment allocation, transaction clarity, and internal reporting — all driven directly by investor feedback.
Operations, Communication & Community
Improving communication was a major operational focus this year. By centralising our email, helpdesk and telephony systems in a single CRM tool, we’ve reduced enquiry volumes and cut average resolution time by 73% — with further improvements planned in 2026.
We’ve also enjoyed reconnecting in person. From the London Business Show to investor dinners and our Spring Forward event, these moments reinforce what makes Crowd2Fund different: community, access, and real conversations between investors and businesses.
Team & Culture
Our team — and our office (including the ever-growing plant collection) — has continued to grow. We were proud to win the 2025 Maya Culture Award, recognising our people-first culture built on collaboration, trust, and inclusivity.
We have also recently partnered with an incredible firm called Evertreen - agreeing to plant at least one tree for every loan we list. Their innovative tree planting platform is a great use of tech - intersecting with a firm commitment to environmental stewardship and also creating global employment opportunities. We can’t wait to see the Crowd2Fund forest flourish.
Looking Ahead to 2026
As we enter 2026, we have two core strategic priorities: to keep default rates low by listing good loans; and to increase the pool of funds available to borrowers so that we can grow the number of UK businesses we can support.
To support these two core objectives we will be growing our investor community, increasing our marketing reach, shortening the funding cycle for borrowers, ensuring all loans ‘fill’ completely, continuing to automate core operations, and delivering clearer data, better tools, and a more seamless experience.
“I’m thrilled to be at the helm of such an exciting company — supporting real growth in the UK economy while delivering a compelling alternative investment opportunity. We won’t lose sight of where we started: people backing businesses to help them achieve their ambitions.”
— Toby Wootton, CEO
Thank you for supporting Crowd2Fund in 2025. You make a very real difference to the businesses you choose to back, and we look forward to building the next chapter together.
Your experience matters. Sharing it on Trustpilot or Google helps us build trust, grow our investor base, and support more UK businesses in the year ahead.
