Emoov founder rejects investor funding claims

The founder of Emoov has hit back at claims that investors might not have been provided with accurate information regarding a £2m fundraising effort which came months before the online estate agency collapsed.

According to The Sunday Times this morning, documents aimed at prospective investors found Emoov, which raised £1.8m from more than 1,000 investors on Crowdcube last summer, was shown “to be in good health while behind the scenes it was losing millions of pounds”.

However, Emoov’s founder Russell Quirk said that the reports were “twisting statistics and contexts”. Quirk told City PM: “The truth is that no one has been misled and all the information requested was provided and backed up as part of the due diligence process.”

He added that crowdfunding opportunities such as the one under scrutiny were a “high reward, high risk game”.

Among the claims made in the reports was that Emoov said it had “nearly 50,000 customers” after a merger in May with two rivals, but a report by the administrator James Cowper Kreston showed that the company had just 2,400 active customers at the time of its insolvency.

According to The Sunday Times, the discrepancy, which was allegedly not made clear in the pitch from Crowdcube, was due to the 50,000 figure being made up of every customer — buyers and sellers — the three companies had ever had.