The European crowdfunding market, operating under the European Crowdfunding Service Providers Regulation (ECSPR), has entered a decisive phase. After years of regulatory transition, in which EUROCROWD played a central role, licensing efforts, and high expectations for rapid cross-border expansion, the reality of 2024 and 2025 has been more sobering. The sector is not contracting in aggregate terms, but it is restructuring, and doing so in a way that exposes the limits of both earlier optimism and inherited business models.
Recent mergers, acquisitions, and platform exits are not isolated events. They form a coherent pattern that, when read alongside ESMA’s 2024 market data, points to a market becoming more selective, more concentrated, and more disciplined. This is not a story of regulatory failure, but neither is it one of effortless success. It is the story of a market discovering what ECSPR can support and what it cannot.
Resilience and Reality
At first sight, the data suggests resilience. More than €4 billion was raised under ECSPR in 2024, transacted by over 180 authorised providers across the Union. Loan-based crowdfunding remained dominant, retail investors accounted for the vast majority of participation, and the regulation has largely brought transparency and legal certainty to a sector long characterised by fragmentation. These figures, however, mask structural pressures that are now shaping strategic decisions across the market.
The first is scale. Average volumes per platform remain modest, and the fixed costs of regulatory compliance—governance, reporting, investor protection mechanism, weigh heavily on smaller operators. Cross-border activity, one of ECSPR’s central promises, is still limited to a relatively small subset of platforms, while equity crowdfunding continues to represent a minor share of total volumes in many Member States. The market, in short, is growing, but not fast or evenly enough to sustain the number of players who entered the ECSPR regime with expectations shaped by a very different funding environment.
Who’s Leaving, and Why
This tension becomes particularly visible when looking at who is leaving the market, and why. Several of the most prominent exits and divestments since 2024 involve institutional or bank-linked owners stepping back. Lumo, previously owned by Société Générale, was sold to its French competitor Enerfip in November 2025. BacktoWork24, long one of Italy’s better-known equity crowdfunding platforms, formerly linked to Intesa Sanpaolo’s innovation and SME ecosystem, merged with Opstart in 2020, with Opstart acquiring a majority stake.
These exits do not reflect regulatory non-compliance, nor do they signal a loss of confidence in alternative finance as such. Rather, they illustrate the difficulty large financial institutions face in justifying crowdfunding platforms internally: the businesses are small in balance-sheet terms, operationally complex, and hard to scale within traditional banking structures. What was once an innovation experiment has, in many cases, been reassessed as non-core.
Italy offers a particularly revealing illustration of this dynamic. The recent announcement by WeAreStarting of a merger with Smart Capital, Smart4Tech, and CrowdFundMe, finalised in January 2026, signals a broader recalibration of the domestic market. The transaction provides for a fusion of Smart4Tech and WeAreStarting into CrowdFundMe, which will remain listed on Euronext Growth Milan, creating an integrated group with advisory, technology, and capital-raising capabilities. Unlike outright exits, these integration moves reflect an attempt to preserve operational continuity and regulatory relevance through consolidation, rather than pursue scale-by-scale expansion.
A quieter but equally telling signal comes from ECSPR licences that have been voluntarily returned across several Member States since 2024 according to ESMA. Some of these cases have not attracted public attention, yet they point to a rational reassessment by smaller operators facing a mismatch between regulatory obligations and achievable market scale.
Excursus: Germany – A Market That Effectively Disappeared
A different but related dynamic is visible in Germany. EV Digital Invest AG, the ECSPR-licensed online real-estate crowdfunding platform linked to Engel & Völkers, filed for insolvency proceedings in July 2025. The platform’s operations were subsequently shut down, with another BaFin-regulated provider, Bergfürst, taking over the technical servicing of existing investor positions. A further structural shift occurred with the merger of Zinsbaustein and Wiwin in April 2025, combining two previously separate ECSPR licence holders into a single platform focused on sustainable real-estate and energy investments.
As a result, the number of active German ECSPR marketplaces has fallen sharply since the start of the regime. While ESMA’s publicly available data in early 2026 still lists six German ECSPR licences, this figure reflects legacy authorisations rather than operational reality. Zinsbaustein has publicly communicated that it returned its licence to BaFin following the merger, while Wiwin itself appears in ESMA’s register with two authorisations. In practical terms, only a small number of ECSPR-licensed platforms remain active, notably Bergfürst and Exporo.
The EV Digital Invest case illustrates the risks associated with early institutional exposure to platform economics that have since been reshaped by regulation. Many such investments were made five or more years ago, in a pre-ECSPR context, when growth assumptions were higher and compliance costs materially lower. The subsequent insolvency does not indicate institutional capital exiting ECSPR as such; rather, it reflects the unwinding of legacy positions that no longer meet institutional risk, return, or governance expectations.
At the same time, a substantial share of crowdfunding-style investment activity in Germany continues to take place outside the ECSPR framework, under what are often described domestically as grey capital market regimes, notably the Vermögensanlagengesetz, or through tied-agent structures linked to MiFID-regulated entities. These models predate ECSPR and were explicitly meant to be rendered obsolete by the Regulation’s harmonisation objective, as set out in its preamble. In practice, however, they remain not only active but dominant in parts of the German market.
This persistence reflects legal and supervisory interpretations that have allowed national regimes to coexist with, and in some cases economically outcompete, the ECSPR framework. The result has been a distorted competitive landscape in which fully ECSPR-compliant platforms face higher regulatory and operational burdens, while alternative structures continue to operate without the same cross-border obligations. Rather than a level playing field, the German experience illustrates how national regulatory legacies can undermine the Regulation’s core promise of market integration and contribute to the effective contraction of the professional ECSPR segment.
In this context, Germany no longer exhibits a diversified, competitive ECSPR ecosystem. What remains is a narrow regulated segment alongside a larger set of actors operating under national exemptions or alternative regulatory umbrellas. The German case illustrates how regulatory interpretation and market legacy can decisively shape (and constrain) the development of the EU’s harmonised crowdfunding framework within a major Member State.
The US Experiment: Wefunder EU’s Exit
The exit of Wefunder EU reinforces this interpretation. As the first established US platform to gain approval to operate under EU crowdfunding rules, Wefunder’s limited traction and subsequent cessation of ECSPR activity underline a structural reality: regulatory compatibility does not guarantee market compatibility. The European crowdfunding landscape is smaller, more fragmented, and subject to different cultural and risk dynamics than its US counterpart. The €5 million cap per issuer, combined with limited exit opportunities and modest average ticket sizes, makes Europe a difficult environment for equity-focused models imported wholesale from elsewhere.
Other US entrants have taken different approaches to participate in the European and UK markets, with mixed outcomes. Republic’s acquisition of Seedrs, one of Europe’s largest equity crowdfunding platforms, was completed in a deal valued at around $100 million and unified a major US operator with a leading UK brand. Under Republic ownership, Seedrs has continued to serve investors in the UK and, through its Irish authorised entity, operates across the EU under ECSPR rules, albeit with a retrenchment of some regional operations including the closure of local offices in Spain and Sweden in 2024 as part of a broader restructuring.
Crowdcube, another UK leader and former would-be merger partner of Seedrs, has also attracted US investor interest: as part of a funding round it received investment from Circle, the owner of SeedInvest, using USD Coin (USDC), an example of cross-Atlantic capital flows into the UK-based business, and retains a European passport through its subsidiary Crowdcube Europe SL authorised by the Spanish regulator.
These cases illustrate that while direct US-origin platforms may struggle to build traction in the ECSPR environment on their own, strategic acquisitions and capital injections into established European brands can shape a hybrid transatlantic presence. However, the mixed performance and retrenchments also underscore that entry via acquisition does not remove the fundamental challenge of aligning business models with Europe’s regulatory structure and investor behaviour.
Consolidation: Strategic vs. Defensive
If exits and licence returns illustrate the market’s constraints, recent mergers and acquisitions reveal its direction of travel. Crucially, not all consolidation reflects the same underlying logic. Some transactions clearly signal strategic confidence. Enerfip’s acquisition of Lumo, and its subsequent expansion into the Netherlands via DurzaamInvestieren, represent deliberate moves to build a pan-European renewable energy finance platform. These are not rescue operations but sector-driven consolidations, anchored in a segment where policy support, investor demand, and predictable cash flows align.
Similarly, GoParity’s acquisition of Spain’s Bolsa Social reflects a belief in the scalability of impact-driven crowdfunding, combining geographic expansion with product diversification. The Invesdor Group has expanded in a similar way already prior to ECSPR, merging Finnish, German, and Austrian operations, only to acquire Dutch OnePlanetCrowd already in ECSPR’s first full year, in 2023.
Other mergers, particularly in Germany, are more defensive in nature. The integration of Zinsbaustein into Wiwin reflects a fragmented real estate crowdfunding market facing investor fatigue, stressed assets, and limited organic growth prospects. The sale of EV Digital Invest’s assets to Germany’s Bergfürst can be understood in a similar vein. These transactions are less about expansion than about preserving viability, reducing duplication, and stabilising portfolios, a pattern that distinguishes strategic consolidation from defensive retreat.
Germany stands out in this respect. Despite its economic scale, the domestic crowdfunding market has struggled to develop the consistent retail risk appetite and deal flow necessary to support a large number of platforms under ECSPR. Real estate, once a growth engine, has been particularly affected by rising interest rates and valuation corrections, amplifying investor caution. In this context, consolidation appears less a strategic choice than a structural necessity, aimed at maintaining relevance in a market where organic growth has proven difficult to sustain in light of competition from unsupervised grey capital market actors.
Is ECSPR “Ready” for Capital?
Taken together, these developments raise a recurring question: is ECSPR “ready” for capital investment? Potentially the question misses the point. ECSPR is well suited to retail capital, and selectively attractive to institutional investors, but it does not, and perhaps cannot, replicate the scale dynamics of venture capital or private credit markets. The issuer cap constrains deployment efficiency, platform margins remain thin, and supervisory fragmentation continues to limit the realisation of cross-border network effects. Institutional investors may not have abandoned the space fully; they may have simply become more selective.
In this sense, recent institutional exits may say less about ECSPR’s long-term viability than about timing. Much of the capital now being written down or withdrawn was committed in an earlier phase of European crowdfunding, when regulatory outcomes were uncertain and platform growth expectations were significantly higher. What is playing out today is maybe not a rejection of the regulated model, but a delayed alignment between capital structures formed pre-ECSPR and a market that has since become more regulated, more transparent, and more constrained.
What emerges is hopefully not capital flight, but capital discipline. Investors are no longer willing to fund platforms on the basis of regulatory novelty or hypothetical scale alone. They are looking for focus, specialisation, and credible paths to sustainability. However, crowdfunding remains a low-margin sector, so any investment in platforms must be able to exercise patience. For ECSPR platforms, the path to economies of scale is key. There will be different ways, but right now it seems focusing on a vertical within the home market is a path to gain traction, just as WeAreStarting is doing in 2026, while expansion into new or key cross-border markets might be the other, as we have seen with Enerfip and GoParity in late 2025. This at least aligns also well with the ambitions of EU policymakers right now with its many high-level strategies focused on harmonisation.
Looking Ahead: A Smaller, More Legible Market
We believe consolidation is unlikely to proceed evenly across all segments. Vertical specialisation, geographic focus, and investor trust are emerging as decisive differentiators, suggesting that future market structure will be shaped less by regulatory access alone and more by demonstrated execution under the ECSPR framework. However, regulatory convergence has remained slow and in some cases (Germany) the detrimental impact on the market is extremely visible.
Looking ahead to 2026, further consolidation appears likely, but it will be uneven. Smaller platforms without a clear value proposition or sufficient scale are likely to exit quietly, returning licences rather than seeking buyers. At the same time, a limited number of well-positioned platforms will continue to pursue targeted acquisitions, filling geographic or product gaps and strengthening their market position. We may also see larger platforms exit the market, most likely through M&A. The result will almost certainly be a smaller (fewer platforms), more legible European crowdfunding landscape which, hopefully, can increase its market size.
This current phase presents both a challenge and an opportunity. Platforms will be challenged to find growth with minimal margins, a buyers’ market. But as the market concentrates, pressure will grow to reduce supervisory divergence, clarify cross-border operational expectations, and reassess whether certain ECSPR parameters still support long-term market development. For the market itself, the message is already clear. This is a market defined less by the number of platforms it hosts than by the resilience and credibility of those that endure.
Consolidation, in this context, should not be mistaken for decline. It is more likely the natural outcome of a market moving from regulatory adolescence into economic adulthood, with graduation not that far off in the future.
