Garage Beer Crowdfunded Half A Million Through Their Customers

The young, but already well-known Barcelona brewer Garage Beer recently closed a round of €500.000.

Even though crowdfunding by principle is a startups closing round of investment from a wide range of small-time investors, Garage Beer have taken it to the next level.

In most crowdfunding rounds there are several angels or individuals behind an amount of large investments. In Garage Beer’s round however, 90 percent of the investments was €1.000 or less. If you’re not familiar with crowdfunding, I can reveal that this is not the everyday’s result.

The Garage Beer team in Barcelona.

After the successful round, it seems like some of the loyal Garage customers literally did the deal of a lifetime. To tempt their customers to invest, the startup offered beer-discounts and even a lifelong supply of free beer.

Also read: Pier 01, Barcelona’s New Startup Headquarters, Will House 1000 People

Extreme growth

The two founders of Garage Beer, Alberto Zamborlin and James Welsh, first opened the shop in Barcelona in January of 2015. After just a month they started exporting the beer abroad, while doing all the billing themselves, and bootstrapping the operation.

According to co-founder Zamborlin, they’ve had interest from investors and VC’s, but the founders wanted their customers to participate in their first round of investment:

We opened this round to the public to avoid that banks and large investors hold our dreams, we wanted to involve customers and friends, as they have been the ones who have been there supporting the project from the beginning.”

The company is currently exporting to Scandinavia, Italy, the US and the UK, among other countries.

After this last round of funding Garage Beer will open a new production site in the district of Sant Andreu of Barcelona, and then plan to increase its production by a tenfold the next 2-3 years.

Record round for Crowdcube

It took the brewery around one month to close the amount €500K.

According to Crowdcube, the platform used to raise the funding, there were 228 people investing in Garage Beer.

This round is the biggest ever round of funding done by Crowdcube, the second biggest was a round of 450.000 by Hemav drones.