I am soo disappointed that I am leaving reviews any place that will take it to help others not make the same mistake I did. Now, I set up two factor authorization but never get the email with the number to enter so I can't even log in now.

I have invested about $40,000 in Seedinvest/StartEngine ( in small amounts) - nothing really grows here. Your betting on these small companies to go public and take you along for a profit ride. But It is not worth it. I stopped when one of my investments was lost and another went public and decimated my initial investment.

If I could do it all over again, I would not get involved with private investments platforms - unless you invest directly with company like Mark Cuban did with Virtuix. For me a few companies that have gone public and I have taken a huge loss for example. One company I invested 2k because I liked the concept, RxNow (prescription medication with an Amaazon.com platform) I believe that was the name. I can't confirm just now because I tried to login to my Start Engine account and it's asking for a passcode sent to my email, I have a limited amount of time to enter it, but I still haven't received it so login can be challenging.

Anyway, for RxNow they filed bankruptcy, I lost all my money in the investment platform and then they sold the company to someone else. So now they make the money they collected from investments platform, but they liquidated everyone's investment and then sold it once all investors were shaken off.

In another case a company when public my $2000 investment, translated into $58 of stock market share - that is the opposite of what investments should do. This happens because the valuation provided in StartEngie is not mirrored when the company is valuated to go public - much much much lower when going public. There are a few companies like Virtuix and Ground Floor that are promising but I could have waited till they went public. Given my history with StartEngin shares going public, I expect my StartEngine shares for all will take a loss when they also go public. But I am saving on the side to invest in them via my Fidelity Portal once they go public as they are great concepts.

Full transparency, I was investing in Groundfloor's real estate loan investment platform before shares were offered in this type of platform (that has paid off more than the ownership shares via StartEngine). And Virtuix investment was mostly to get a 40% off their Bata unit ( which breaks me at almost even and eliminated most if my risk).

My latest investment that will go public is PhorMed - recently got an email. I will be surprised if I don't take a hit there as well. Once it's over if I don't take a loss, I'll update this post. Otherwise it will be safe to assume I took a loss.

Note I have thought about selling my StartEngine investments but you can only do it via StartEngine and for me it is at a loss. So might as well ride it out, but no more investing in StartEngine for me.

But like all things in life failures are only bad if you don't learn. Using my Tax returns I decided to try different options - we claim zero all year and got $******* one year. I invested in stockpile. $2000 for each one of my two kids 4 yrs ago. And $10,000 via Fidelity investments
- chose these because they didn't charge fees to invest. Although I think Stockpile might have changed since then.

Anyway I purchased Regular stocks like Amazon, Tesla, Google, Disney, Starbuck, and also a little more risky like innovative tech like Picar (electric semi- trucks), Nvidia ( when I heard in the news they were experimenting with AI). In about 4 yrs not adding anything else the $2000 is a little over $10,000 today and my $10,000 turned to almost $50,000. This will change depending on what you pick but for me, in the real stock market, the profit number keeps going up

For some this is not a big deal and I commend you if you are that fortunate, but to the subject at hand, my 40K in investment StartEngine and Seedinvest platforms in over 7 years have only taken losses. The only people making money in my opinion is StartEngine. I can only imagine what my $40,000 at SartEngin would look like now if I had dropped them into my fidelity investment accviunt - or any other regular investment channel.

Hope this helps. But if you are the kind that like to experience these kind of life lessons, buy PhorMed inc. they are still selling private stocks at $1 a share. See it for yourself. I will be pleasantly surprised if I get $0.20 on the dollar. I expect much less and defiantly not a profit. But PhorMed is a good company and I will invest when they go public…. But via my Fidelity account.

A rep from StartEngine responded quickly to a question I asked and was very friendly 👍

If you don't care how morally reprehensible a company is, investing via StartEngine may be right for you. Until of course, they screw you over as well. I tried to raise money via StartEngine. They told me it would take 1 month to go live, and that it was imperative to "sign up now" if I wanted to benefit from the end of year rush of funds they saw in November and December. When they didn't make the November and December cutoff date due to a variety of incompetent mistakes, they said "don't worry," the salesperson who told you that was misleading you anyway.

Many months later, I had spent over $15k at StartEngine's direction, and we still had not launched. StartEngine tried to push me into signing documents several times, without allowing me time for my lawyer to review. When I asked for a review with my lawyer, they took several days to respond and then stated that they could not "adequately provide the service and attention that your business and campaign demand" and while they would not reimburse me for my fees, they would charge me an additional $10k if I did not sign a waiver and release agreement. Yup, you read that right.

These immoral bags of scum understood my wife was suffering from Stage IV cancer, and that the 7 months of wasted time and money I spent with them had cost my business, my wife and I dearly. They were also aware that I did not owe them an additional $10k, but it did not stop them from trying to walk all over the same honest man that they had been screwing over for half a year.

I finally got in touch with their founder and CEO, Howard Marks, whose personality reminded me of a combination between Gordon Gekko and an actual reptilian lizard of the same name which crawls around on all fours stalking its prey. I explained to Howard the impacts that StartEngine's incompetence, lies and mistakes had on my wife and me. He did not bat an eyelash. He said that he thought "raising capital is the right thing to do," as if nothing else mattered. He also stated that "sometimes we have to pass on mistakes to customers." My Zoom call with Howard from his home, which he could not resist to tell me was in Beverly Hills, ended with a mutual understanding that moving forward with StartEngine would require eliminating all future StartEngine fees. Howard then followed up with an email where he lied about this understanding, and that is when I knew I simply could not move forward with this business, within which Howard's complete lack of a moral compass has become the business standard at every level.

StartEngine's Howard Marks and Kevin O'Leary do not care about their customers. They are most focused on raising money for themselves, as evidenced by the fact that the prime real estate on their website has been dedicated to StartEngine's own fundraising effort for months. These people do not have the morality that God gave a tadpole. Take a look at their 'F' rating with the Better Business Bureau and make a decision for yourself whether or not you want to work with StartEngine.

By the way, I have logged a complaint against this company with the Better Business Bureau, and I suggest others who have been taken advantage of by this company do the same, as it is one of the best ways to create change.

My startup company interviewed StartEngine, WeFunder and Republic before deciding on StartEngine because of what their sales team promised... which turned out to be MANY LIES.

1) Sales Team Lie: startup needs to raise first $45K from friends and family, then StartEngine will blast out to their community and get thousands more page views and many investors. Reality, After raising first $50K from friends and family, StartEngine sent an email to only a few people, and we got very few page views and investments. After the first 30 days over 90% of page views and funding was from friends and family

2) Lie: StartEngine committed to startup success. Reality: StartEngine stopped supporting our startup as soon after they collected their $10K setup fee. SE does not care if a startup is successful or not, they just want as many on their platform as possible.

3) Lie: can set any valuation to start the campaign, and can then lower later at any time. Reality: We asked StartEngine to lower our valuation after a few months and they told us we cannot. 100% opposite of what they told us to close the deal and collect our $10K + a fee on all investments.

4) Lie: StartEngine is an expert at Facebook ads, and that will drive traffic and investments. Reality, we have a negative ROI on FB ads through StartEngine, yet they are still asking us to spend spend spend, so that they can get a fee for the service.

Summary, if you are a startup, AVOID START ENGINE AT ALL COSTS. Complete SCAM. Most employees just graduated college and they have no clue what they are doing. And most importantly they do not care if you have a good or bad experience, they only care about collecting fees. Their senior management also does not care to help startups be successful on their platform. They are playing a numbers game and just trying to sign up as many companies and investors as they can, so that they can collect more fees.

Is Start Engine.com a SCAM? Crowdfunding platforms are one of the newer hyper financial hysterias with little insight. Here is the experience Overland ATS LLC had with Start Engine. A word of caution for both investors and start-ups raising capital.
Investors, be careful, many if not most Start Engine investment offerings are NON-VOTING common stock, many start-ups have operating losses and negative equity, financial disclosures can disguise the reality, the stock offering is often also so small compared to the enormous number of shares founders have given themselves that your equity is unconscionably diluted (I. E., it will have little value even if the company is very successful.) Convertible bonds are occasionally offered at minimal interest rates. Some appear to have no intention of ever paying cash interest. Instead interest is accrued, and the mature bonds and interest are then converted in a confusing formula that can have a substantial built-in loss before they are even purchased. One start-up reserves the right to buy back its bonds at a heavily discounted rate, presumably, if the company succeeds. Of course, investing in start-ups, is inherently a risk but these shenanigans throw investors in the dumpster before they even write the check. These are not illegal, but I consider them unethical.
Investors must be wary of the way Start Engine does rolling closings. In a rolling closing the investor must write a non-refundable check, Start Engine gets its 6% commission, and the start-up gets the rest of your money. However, the funding in a rolling closing is only a small part of the capital raise the company needs. Can this be considered a scam? That is open for discussion.
The most important information is in a link at the bottom of the Overview called Offering Detail. Investors should read this. Most offerings provide very little financial details.
Investors may want to invest in start-ups with services and products they personally find appealing. At Start Engine a start-up is going to offer bottled water despite the billions of gallons of bottled water sold by giant beverage companies at prices below what it would cost a start-up to make. Another Start Engine start-up was accountants who had spent years generating notes about defects in existing accounting software despite thousands of accounting programs in existence. They were raising funds to hire a programmer to write a program so exceptional that it would become a global product. Frequently start-ups do not have a working prototype, but they should have a concept. Their market should not be saturated with competition. This judgment is up to the investor.
Start-ups trying to select a Crowdfunding Platform should recognize the differences. Overland ATS LLC was disappointed in its experience with Start Engine. Start-ups should look at the typical size of individual investor investments. Look for crowdfunding platforms that have substantial individual investments. This can indicate their audience includes some real potential investors. The Start Engine platform audience and investments are typically small, starting at just a couple hundred dollars. These investors, it seems, have to crack open their piggy bank for money earned cutting grass. These are not affluent individuals.
The Overland ATS LLC experience with Start Engine was a lack of responsiveness and a lack of communication. Overland ATS LLC paid $5,000 for extra support, but there was no additional contract, and minimal support.
A word of caution to start-ups, in our experience the Start Engine contracts are vague about what they are to do, they will not even respond to questions or even consider making modifications before contracts are signed, they will just wait you out. After contracts are signed and the fees paid Start Engine, in our experience, seems lax in performing obligations.
Overland ATS LLC contracted with Start Engine Promote to manage its advertising. Start Engine immediately started spending our money, ignored terms of the contract, diverted our respondents to their own website. Designated contacts would not answer phone calls or respond to E-mails directed directly to that department. Our singular contact would promise a return call or e-mail, but they never did. After running up over $5,000 in Facebook ads, and after we blocked continued charging I received a call and I could tell them the contract was terminated and they stopped.
Start Engine is a company that hides behind the anonymity provided by the web. They respond only when it is something they need. There is no way to know who you are really working with, what qualifications they have, if any, or who is making the decisions or why they decide. Start Engine does not care if you complain or are dissatisfied. This was our experience.
The most serious issue we had with Start Engine was the Form C and the Overview presentation. After our entire application was finalized we were told our attorney must sign a statement certifying everything was true and correct and complied with all applicable SEC regulations. This is really asking a lot because they had screened all our information and not our attorney. He was unable to look at the Start Engine website to see what they had. He could not download a copy of Form C for himself and they blocked him (and us) from the Overview and Form C. We had a copy of what Start Engine referred to us as Form C (about 50 pages) and our attorney hesitantly signed off with their assurance they had made no changes.
After our attorney signed off Start Engine allowed our campaign to go live. However, it had been substantially stripped of what we considered our best features.
Without getting into lengthy detail these included significant calculations, and application of funds.
Overland ATS LLC offering was Closed End with a NON-DILUTION commitment that fixed the proposed raising to equity ownership equal to the founder, first round investors were allowed first right to buy up to 10 times more units at a 10% discount in a continuing and final equity offering, first round investors would receive a preferred distribution of the value of their initial investment if/when the company became profitable before profits were distributed to the founders and later investors. All of this was removed.
Full disclosure, the Overland ATS LLC offering was not a success, or Investors simply did not find our offering sufficiently attractive. Overland ATS LLC does not place any blame for our failure on Start Engine.
Overland ATS LLC notified our contact person that significant portions of our campaign had been deleted. The Response was to ask for $1,000 and they would look at it. We felt there should be no charge because items deleted had been in the original campaign approved by our attorney and he had a copy of it as we also did. As requested, we sent a draft of what needed to be added. This is when the "COMMITTEE" became involved. The committee is a mysterious and final arbiter of what can be placed on the website. The committee has high ground because it is simply making sure the campaigns comply with SEC regulations. This committee appeared to be one person with non-disclosed qualifications. For brevity purposes we will just say the "committee" repeatedly rejected our drafts but would not explain why in a straight forward manner. Each time it would take a week to get a reply and usually it was emailed late on a Friday evening. When finally, our restoration of information was completed more than a month of our campaign had been consumed and we decided it was too late and pointless to pay the $1,000 fee. Overland ATS LLC allowed the campaign clock to run out.
Overland ATS LLC emphasizes that this was only our experience. Perhaps somewhere along the way we antagonized someone. Other start-ups using Start Engine may have a wonderful experience.
Start-ups are encouraged to make fair offers to investors. There are many good crowdfunding platforms out there and they are not all equal. Perhaps you should shop around.