Why Murena, the Next-Gen Privacy Tech Maker, is “Crowd-Fundraising”

Murena, the company that develops advanced privacy-focused technology including a pro-privacy mobile operating system /e/OS and digital workspace, is fundraising using a crowdfunding platform.

The funding operation is going pretty well, as we have reached the initial funding target in just a few hours, and we can reasonably expect to raise between 700K€ and 1M€ by the end of the campaign.

As a highly innovating startup, Murena has had to invest heavily in product development over the past few years, and this continues as new topics such as (ethical) AI are emerging. Additionally, we see a strong opportunity to expand our current range of B2C-focused products into the B2B market.

Also, Murena has so far been mostly an “engineers” company, with most of its operational expenses used to pay engineers, and it’s time to start investing more in communication and marketing to expand our customer reach and therefore scale our business as quickly as possible.

These are the main reasons why Murena is raising funds: significantly increase communication and marketing to grow the business, and to invest in the development of its B2B products.

So why are we using crowdfunding for our fundraising?

There are several reasons that triggered the choice for crowdfunding:

1. We think that Murena and its products have reached a good level of visibility and reputation: with more than 45K montly users of the mobile operating system and more than 120K accounts opened on the murena.io workspace, that is a good sign that we can potentially get some attention from quite a lot of individuals willing to invest in our project.
2. We also think that it’s fair for Murena users, supporters and customers to own a part of the project. The day we can to redistribute some value, we’ll be thrilled if it goes to individuals (and not just to professionnal investors)!
3. Crowdfunding is also good for marketing: it provides a communication boost that helps more people discover what we are doing, and potentially become new customers.
4. Talking with so called “venture capital” investment funds, it has become more clear recently that Murena is too different, too atypical for their “investment thesis”. The ideal prey for VC funds, is a young company that will develop a product or vertical technology that fills a gap for an existing big tech, and can be sold quickly with a good ROI. VCs are about short-term ROI, not about values or wealth development. But Murena doesn’t want to be a prey for big techs: we want to build a sustainable and independent business at large scale, we want to be a strong player in our fast-growing new market segment that celebrates the development of positive impact techonologies.

The latest reason strongly resonated recently when I met the CEO of one of the biggest pro-privacy online service company. He told me that success in our space requires sustained long term financing.

This is really about independence, and to me that means that besides developing the business, which is the best way to self-finance, we need to diversify our investors and have investors who wish to give a meaning to their investment.

Finally, raising funds through crowdfunding as Murena is doing at Crowdcube strongly aligns with our journey to develop great products that truly respects their users and the planet.

— Gaël Duval, CEO and Founder of Murena. June 2024.

Follow me on @gael_duval on X/Twitter, @gael@mastodon.social on Mastodon.