Invesdor: A great way to invest in Green and MedTech Scaleups?

Invesdor at a glance

The star rating reflects my impression of the provider after investing with them since 2018 (including its predecessor, OnePlanetCrowd).

Category	Crowd-funded loans and private equity
Country of origin	Finland, with offices in Germany, Austria and the Netherlands
Certifications	Licensed European Crowdfunding Provider; B Corp
Geographical focus of investments	European companies, although these sometimes focus on developing countries
Minimum investment	Usually €250
Fees	Bonds: None Private Equity: 1.5% on the invested amount
Internal Rate of Return (IRR)*	IRR of my own portfolio with the provider over the last… 5 years: 6.15% 3 years: 6.30% (looking at loans only, since none of my private equity investments has been sold or defaulted yet)
Referral programme	none
Similar offers	For Bonds: Trine, GoParity, Lita, Enerfip and others For Private Equity: Republic, Crowdcube, Lita

*including fees, as of Oct 2025. Please note that the IRR is merely intended to give you a real-life view of how an actual user’s portfolio (mine) developed over time. Yours could look better or worse, depending on your investment preferences and timing.

Owning a Piece of the Change You Want to See

There are only two objects in my life I strongly identify with: my bamboo bike and my Fairphone. Dutch company Fairphone started in 2013 with a mission to create the world’s first “fair” smartphone. Founder Bas van Abel wanted to end bad practices in the smartphone value chain by producing a phone without conflict minerals. But he also wanted to produce a phone that is fair to its owners, by keeping it repairable. With the Fairphone 2 they created the world’s first modular smartphone, a feat not even Google managed. As a tiny company with big dreams, they started off crowdfunding their first two models: I still remember fondly when I bought my Fairphone 1 from my student dorm in Helsinki <3

5 years later, in 2018, Fairphone decided the best step to reach the next step of growth was another crowdfunding campaign, this time not to sell phones but shares in the company itself. Fairphone chose their fellow Dutch compatriots at OnePlanetCrowd to facilitate the process.

When investing, nothing beats personal experience in the product

Over the last 10 years, many of my friends, colleagues and clients have come to rue the moment they ask “What’s a Fairphone?” after seeing it lying on the table. “Glad you asked!” I would say, making them sit through a 30min monologue on why Fairphone was amazing. So when Fairphone started looking for crowdinvestors, this Fairphone evangelist didn’t think long. I knew they had already beat Google to the first modular phone, the product was getting better with each generation and I could frequently see the devices in the streets of Zürich (strangely, Fairphone is better known in Switzerland than the Netherlands).

For me, buying Fairphone shares was as much an investment decision as fanboy behaviour. And that’s totally ok! If my dad, already an Apple fanboy in the 90s, had spent as much money on buying the company’s shares as their computers in the early 2000s, he would have made about €2m! Which goes to prove that if you really like a product for yourself, others will probably too – in my opinion a pretty good (but not sufficient!) reason for investing. As for myself, I had the first possibility to sell my Fairphone shares last year with a profit of +60%, but I decided to hold on to them for now.

A multinational origin story

In 2023, OnePlanetCrowd who had led Fairphone’s crowdfunding was acquired by Invesdor, a Finnish company with much the same offering. Both provided crowdinvestments in young start-ups, but also scale-ups such as Fairphone. A scale-up is the stage a young company reaches once it has proven their model works and is now looking to grow fast, or “scale up”. It was in this way that I became an Invesdor investor. And don’t worry – their concept is much better than their branding!

Invesdor’s impact approach: Variety.

As I’m writing this, three of Invesdor’s last six investments started more than nine years ago and three in the last five years. While investing in early-stage start-ups can be exciting, I’m quite a fan of investing in scale-ups. They come with all the same impact potential, but less risk. The start-up needs capital to bring a product to market or even just develop a prototype. The scale-up has already moved beyond that phase and needs the money to speed up growth instead. They could be using your capital to keep improving their product, but also to hire new staff, boost marketing, or expand into a new market. That makes it much less of a gamble for investors: after all, the team behind the company has already shown they can make their concept or innovation work!

Many impact investment platforms focus on a specific niche to develop specific expertise. For example, Trine focuses mostly on solar projects in developing countries, Lendahand on social impact. Invesdor provides a much wider variety of investments to choose from. Ginolis, shown above, was raising money to increase sales of their innovative medical diagnostics equipment. Next to it on the screenshot, Rainmaker sells devices to extract humidity from air to provide clean drinking water to communities and hotels in rural areas.

Variety is love, variety is life!

Other than that the last few months have seen…

• …a new business model to help trendy restaurants expand into suburbs (Huuva)
• …a builder and operator of combined hydrogen-and-charging stations for cars and trucks (Fountain Fuel)
• …an innovative device to bring old fossil heating systems into the digital age, resulting in rapid emission cuts (metr)
• …a solar park developer (Green Fox Energy)

Invesdor adds new projects about every few weeks, meaning investors have a lot of variety to choose from. This is especially great if you already have a lot of investment concentrated in one field, e.g. solar projects with Trine or Enerfip, and would like to diversify. It’s conceivable that the lack of specialisation could lead to worse project selection. Trustpilot includes several reviews complaining about many defaulting projects. But I cannot confirm that so far.

3 different investment models to choose from

Invesdor offers both loans and direct investments in companies. That sets it apart from most other platforms I’ve reviewed, which tend to focus on either one or the other. Here’s how they work.

Loans / Bonds

With a loan, you provide a company capital in return for a set amount of interest. Over time, they will also pay back the capital itself. A loan is generally less risky than a direct investment, because even if the company isn’t doing well, it still has to repay you if possible. The company needs to really run out of money for the money to be lost and even then you will likely still get parts of your investment back. That’s part of Invesdor’s role.

Direct Investments / Private Equity

With a direct investment, i.e. buying a company’s shares, you trade that bit of security for a potential for high returns. If the company is sold to a big investor later, you will receive a much bigger payout than if you had just lent the money at a set percentage. But if the company goes bust, you lose all the money.

Convertible Bonds

A convertible bond is something in between a loan and shares. It starts out as a loan, but can be converted fully or in part (e.g. only the interest) into shares in the company. You can read more about convertible bonds on Invesdor’s homepage. For example, my Fairphone investment was originally a bond, before it was converted into shares of sorts.

Knowledge is… Trust. Invesdor’s excellent project pages

What I like best about Invesdor are their excellent project descriptions. As you can see below, the page is clearly structured in some general information about the company being funded, the financial data and key investment documents. While the campaign is online, the company raising capital can also add updates about ongoing developments, such as milestones reached or contracts with new clients.

As you scroll down, you see the usual key facts about the company, followed by a description of their products or services and business model. Especially the business model section goes much deeper than “we sell product A to customer X and service B to customer Y”. Here, the company explains concisely how they address a key customer pain and how they intend to address challenges such as unpredictable cash flows. The following market section then looks at how big the market is, who the competitors are as well as their main strengths and weaknesses.

Do they have what it takes?

One of the most important segments, in my view, is the management team. The best business idea will fail if the people who should implement it lack the right skills and experience. And yet, I’ve seen plenty of project descriptions elswhere that limit this section to 1-2 sentences per person – not enough. Invesdor, on the other hand seems to require a more in-depth description of a person’s role and experience:

This gives you a good idea whether the company has the right team to be successful, without having to stalk each of them on LinkedIn (been there, done that).

Further down, the company describes its recent milestones and provides a closer look at how it will use the funds raised in the Invesdor campaign.

A look at the book(s)

You would think that the most important section of any company asking investors for money is their current financial situation. Unfortunately, many crowdinvestment providers don’t disclose this information to investors, although it will be part of their own due dilligence.

I personally have a big problem with that. It’s a huge difference if I invest in a company with a solid financial track record, as opposed to one that is nowhere near profitability. Or that depends on this loan alone to have enough cash to keep going. Fortunately, Investor provides very detailed accounts of the Profit & Loss Statement, the Balance Sheet and the Cashflow statement.

But it’s also a point for improvement. I have now repeatedly seen projects where

• …the last financial year is shown, but else only forecasts. Forecasts are relevant to know when the company intends to reach profitability or positive cashflow. But in the end, they are still only an educated guess and say nothing about how the company has performed so far.
• …there were mistakes or at least inconsitencies between the figures shown on the (promotional) project page and the legal documents. In one case where I asked Invesdor about this, they checked and later confirmed the error. Sure, mistakes happen. But when it comes to the numbers, I expect some double checking.

Impact academy and blog

If Invest4Change does not satisfy your thirst for impact investing knowledge, Invesdor also offers additional resources to expand your knowledge.

The Blog provides general insights about impact investing. There are articles explaining the idea behind funding scale-ups or the opportunities from investing in sustainable real estate. As you might expect, most of the articles are designed to promote their own projects. But that’s not a bad thing. After all, it helps you understand the context of an investment, including its impact, risks and opportunities.

The Invesdor Academy promises to make participants into “crowdfunding professionals”. Looking at the “curriculum”, that’s an overstatement – the course covers crowdfunding basics and seems mostly designed to help people understand Invesdor itself. I haven’t gone through it myself, but it sounds like a good idea before you invest. If you’ve tried it, let me know your thoughts in the comments below!

My experience with Invesdor

Despite being invested since 2018, through Invesdor’s predecessor OnePlanetCrowd, I didn’t actually back that many companies. OPC was not a very active platform, so I only had a few investments prior to 2024. Nevertheless, these showed no problems whatsoever and it appears the former OnePlanetCrowd team is still responsible for sourcing at least some of the projects today.

Around 2024, companies were becoming both more diverse and more established. As I ramped up my engagements in both loans and private equity I’m happy with the communication both pre- and post-investment.

It’s perhaps too early for a meaningful overview of my portfolio’s performance, but as of late October 2025, my Internal Rate of Return (IRR) with Invesdor is
6.15% over 5 years
6.30% over 3 years

That’s quite a bit better than what I see with other crowdfunding platforms and probably mostly due to the fact that I haven’t seen any defaults yet. Please note that this only includes loan-based investments and excludes, for instance, my stake in Fairphone. Once the value of any of my private equity investments changes, I will update the figure accordingly.

Conclusion: Diverse and Solid

For me, Invesdor has delivered stable long-term performance with impactful companies, not least my favourite phone brand. I appreciate both the quality and diversity of the companies seeking funding and the pre-investment project information is top notch. The only real issues I have are that financial figures of some projects are sometimes inconsistent and that interest payments go directly to a bank account instead of a digital wallet.

Pros & Cons

💚 Broad range of different companies supports diversification

💚 Regular med-tech offerings provide access to a key industry of the future

💚 Possibility to invest in scale-ups which are already at or near profitability. This reduces the risk compared to investing in start-ups without much of a track record. But be careful to spot the difference, because Invesdor offers both.

💚 Stable long-term performance in my experience, so far no defaults.

💚 Very good Trustpilot score of 4.2.

💚/🚫 Great project page, but sometimes incorrect financial information. Invesdor provides better project information than most competitors, which helps make an informed decision. However, I noticed errors between the business figures in the official contract documents and the numbers published on the promotional page more than once. When asked about it in one case, Invesdor confirmed there was a mistake.

💚/🚫 Clear portfolio dashboard, but some important information is difficult to find, such as a list of recent transactions or a summary of paid fees, see next point.

💚/🚫 Interest payments directly to the bank account, no wallet. Could be a plus for those for whom cash is king, but I find annoying. I prefer when the payments go to a wallet on the platform itself.

🚫 Fees a bit intransparent. The 1.5% fee when investing in equity stakes is not communicated clearly. Invesdor claims the fee is transparently disclosed, but I only discovered the fee after five such investments when my payment was higher than expected.

🚫 Some reports of several defaults, though I can’t confirm that based on own experience.

And what do you think?

Have you had experience with Invesdor yourself? Whatever it is, I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

And if you’re already hyped for impact investing, head on over to my overview of options I’ve tried and reviewed!