Monzo’s 2016 crowd round: about 28x on paper

The round

In 2016 Monzo was still called Mondo, a bank in testing with a waiting list and £5,000 in revenue. Tech.eu ↗ (opens in a new tab) describes the offer on Crowdcube as up to 3% of the business at a £29m valuation, and reports that it raised £1m in 96 seconds from just under 2,000 people.

Two more public rounds followed on the platform at far higher prices. Crowdfund Insider ↗ (opens in a new tab) reported £2.5m from more than 6,800 investors in March 2017. The December 2018 round raised £18m in under three hours ↗ (opens in a new tab), at about £7.70 a share ↗ (opens in a new tab). The 28x on this page belongs to the first round only.

What happened

Monzo has not been sold or listed. In March 2024 it raised £340m ↗ (opens in a new tab) at a pre-money valuation of £3.6bn, and said its share price stayed at £14.41. Tech.eu ↗ (opens in a new tab) used that valuation in June 2024 to put one investor's £1,000 from 2016 at over £28,000, and noted that the gain had yet to be realised.

Later marks exist. In October 2024 an employee share sale ↗ (opens in a new tab) valued the bank at $5.9bn, with no share price we could find. In October 2026 Payment Expert ↗ (opens in a new tab) reported early indications of a share sale at about £8bn. We have not moved the figure on either, as neither gives a price a crowd holder could compare.

What the figure does and does not say

This is the clearest paper gain on the list. About 28x is what a valuation says a share would fetch if there were a buyer, and Tech.eu ↗ (opens in a new tab) is explicit that its investor had not sold. A private company's price is set by the investors in its latest round, who usually hold rights that ordinary crowd shares do not.

The multiple is one report's worked example ↗ (opens in a new tab), not a figure Monzo or Crowdcube published for all holders, and it takes no account of tax. It could rise or fall before any sale, and a holder has no set date on which to find out.