---
title: "MicroVentures Review"
url: https://altstreet.investments/platforms/reviews/microventures
kind: platform-review
updated: 2026-10-24
description: "Is MicroVentures legit? Review of 195 Reg CF offerings and 1,018 Reg D vehicles: no active crowdfunding offerings, no published fees (5% cash plus a 2% securities interest in the filings), a 2019 FINRA fine, and $289.3M verified against a claimed $550M."
publisher: AltStreet (https://altstreet.investments)
license: Public factual pages may be read, quoted and cited with attribution and a link. Bulk redistribution is not permitted.
---

# MicroVentures Review

MicroVentures markets itself as equity crowdfunding, and AltStreet's reconstruction of its SEC record shows that channel is now close to dormant: 195 Regulation Crowdfunding offerings by 182 issuers, peaking at 38 initial filings in 2020 and down to 4 in 2025, with no offering open on the platform's own public feed on September 18, 2026. The business still filing steadily is accredited-only, a series of single-purpose Regulation D vehicles numbered in Roman numerals that had reached MVP LS FUND 685. The company publishes 'over $550M' raised on one of its sites and 'over $700+ million' on the other, with no reconciliation between them; AltStreet could verify $289,281,413 of capital sold through the platform's own offerings, and explains below why that is a floor rather than a refutation.

AltStreet score: 39.8 (C-), scored October 24, 2026. Method: https://altstreet.investments/platforms

| Field | Value |
| --- | --- |
| Platform | MicroVentures |
| What it is | Broker-Dealer Private Placement Marketplace (Regulation D single-purpose vehicles, Regulation Crowdfunding, and private-company secondary transactions) |
| Asset class | Private Company Securities (Crowd Notes, SAFEs, preferred stock, and interests in single-purpose Regulation D vehicles) |
| Website | microventures.com |
| Review first published | September 18, 2026 |
| Last updated | October 24, 2026 |
| AltStreet relationship | None: no affiliate, sponsorship or partnership |

## The short version

MicroVentures is the trading name of MicroVenture Marketplace Inc., a FINRA-member broker-dealer in Austin, Texas, incorporated in Delaware on October 26, 2009 and wholly owned by MicroVentures Inc. BrokerCheck records two lines of business for it: private placements of securities, and facilitating private company stock transactions. Its Regulation Crowdfunding book ran through its own registration and, from 2016 to 2019, through an affiliated funding portal, First Democracy VC, which withdrew its portal registration on January 31, 2019. That retail channel peaked at 38 initial Form C filings in 2020 and has fallen to 4 in 2025, with no offering open on the platform's public feed in September 2026. AltStreet's census records 182 issuers and 195 offerings, 144 of them funded, and $28,540,887 of realized Regulation Crowdfunding capital. The Regulation D side is the business still filing steadily: 1,692 Form D filings across 1,018 issuers since 2011, of which 999 are the platform's own single-purpose vehicles that report $260,740,526 sold. The firm carries one FINRA disciplinary event, a 2019 settlement with a $40,000 fine for failing to file twenty private placement memoranda, and it is comfortably capitalized.

- **195 / 182** Regulation Crowdfunding offerings and distinct issuers naming MicroVenture Marketplace or First Democracy VC as intermediary, 2016 to 2025, built from 696 Form C family filings (194 Form C, 325 Form C/A, 177 Form C-U). 194 offerings opened with an initial Form C; 11 issuers ran more than one. Initial Form C by year: 6, 31, 29, 36, 38, 17, 18, 8, 7, 4.
- **$28,540,887** Realized Regulation Crowdfunding capital across 144 funded offerings by 137 issuers, taking the largest progress update within each offering and summing across offerings. Median offering $123,698; largest $1,070,000 (Jetson AI, opened 2019). A further 25 offerings filed a progress update that states no amount.
- **$260,740,526** Reported sold by the platform's own 999 single-purpose Regulation D vehicles, across 15,282 investor positions. A floor rather than a measurement: 370 of those vehicles report no sale and were never amended. Separately, 19 third-party issuers naming the firm report $26,076,989 of offering size, which does not establish that MicroVentures placed those rounds.
- **5% + 2%** The most recently disclosed Regulation Crowdfunding fee: a 5 percent cash commission on the amount raised, on 81 offerings from 2020 to 2025, plus securities equal to 2 percent of the securities sold on 126 of 194 offerings. It was 7 percent on 50 offerings from 2016 to 2018. No fee schedule is published on the website.
- **0 active** Regulation Crowdfunding offerings open on the platform's own public endpoint on September 18, 2026, against 145 marked funded. Completing registration and the investor questionnaire unlocked nothing and produced a request to schedule a call.

Data note: AltStreet Form C census across both of the operator's Regulation Crowdfunding intermediaries (MicroVenture Marketplace Inc., CIK 1478147, and First Democracy VC, CIK 1683054): 696 filings resolved into 195 offerings by 182 issuers, with outcome classification for 179; a Regulation D universe built from EDGAR full-text search sliced by year (1,692 filings, 1,018 issuers) and priced from each issuer's latest Form D; the platform's public offerings API (145 funded, 0 active); the audited Form X-17A-5 for fiscal 2025; and the FINRA BrokerCheck report for CRD 152513. All as of 2026-09-18.


## Key figures

| Figure | What it is | Context |
| --- | --- | --- |
| 0 | Active Regulation Crowdfunding offerings on the platform's own public endpoint, September 18, 2026, against 145 marked funded | Initial Form C filings by year: 38 in 2020, then 17, 18, 8, 7 and 4 |
| $289.3M | Capital AltStreet could verify as sold through the platform's own offerings, against company figures of 'over $550M' and 'over $700+ million' with no published reconciliation | A floor, not a refutation: 370 of 999 vehicles report no sale and were never amended |
| 5% + 2% | Cash commission plus a securities interest disclosed in the Form C filings since 2020; typical Regulation D fees in the help center, fee types in the Form CRS, actual terms in each memorandum | It was 7 percent from 2016 to 2018; in 2019 all 36 offerings state no cash commission is owed |
| 25% | Confirmed-raise issuers that filed neither an annual report nor a termination, against 40 percent market-wide on the same issuer-level test | 100 of 134 filed at least one Form C-AR; better than the market |


## Verdict

MicroVentures is a long-established broker-dealer running a real and sizeable private-placement business, and it is better capitalized and better disclosed at the filing level than most platforms AltStreet reviews. Its Regulation Crowdfunding issuers file their annual reports more often than the market average, measured issuer by issuer. The problems are in the gap between the business and its presentation. Equity crowdfunding is the platform's headline product, and its filings in that channel have fallen to four offerings a year with none open. The company publishes two materially different lifetime capital figures on its own two sites with no reconciliation. It publishes no fee schedule at all, although its filings disclose a 5 percent commission plus a 2 percent securities interest. And the registration flow that the marketing invites you into does not show you an offering at the end of it. For an accredited investor with a specific company in mind and a willingness to take a call, this is a credible arranger. For anyone expecting a browsable crowdfunding marketplace, the site leads with something that is not currently on offer.

**Best for**

- Accredited investors who want access to a named late-stage private company through a single-purpose vehicle and will read that vehicle's terms in full
- Sellers of private company stock looking for a registered broker-dealer to facilitate a transaction
- Existing Crowd Note and SAFE holders from the 2016 to 2020 crowdfunding years who need to locate their issuer's filings and conversion terms
- Researchers who want the Regulation D vehicle record of a fifteen-year-old private-placement operator in one place

**Look elsewhere if**

- You are a non-accredited investor expecting live Regulation Crowdfunding offerings: none was open on September 18, 2026 and only four were filed in all of 2025
- You want to compare the actual terms of an offering before creating an account and speaking to someone: the help center's Regulation D figures are typical ones, and each offering memorandum sets the real ones
- You are relying on the advertised lifetime capital totals: two materially different figures appear on the company's own two sites with no published reconciliation
- You need a defined exit: a Crowd Note converts only on the triggers its terms set out, and the secondary desk carries a $50,000 buyer minimum

**Strengths**

- Comfortably capitalized broker-dealer: net capital $4,238,994 against a $250,000 minimum, aggregate indebtedness to net capital of 0.0101 to 1 against a 15 to 1 limit, audited by Bauer & Company
- Fifteen years of continuous SEC and FINRA registration, with X-17A-5 annual reports filed since 2011 and a single disciplinary event on the record
- Regulation Crowdfunding annual-report compliance better than the market on an issuer-level test: 34 of 134 confirmed-raise issuers filed neither an annual report nor a termination, 25 percent against 40 percent market-wide
- Fees are disclosed in the filings on every offering that has an initial Form C, including the securities interest the platform takes alongside the cash commission

**Limitations**

- The retail channel was inactive on the day of this review: 4 initial Form C filings in 2025, none open on the platform's own feed, while the accredited Regulation D vehicle count keeps climbing
- Two materially different lifetime capital claims with no published reconciliation, against $289,281,413 AltStreet could verify as sold through the platform's own offerings
- No fee schedule, terms page or how-it-works content on the investing subdomain: every such page returns navigation chrome only; typical Regulation D fees are in a help-center article and the fee types in the Form CRS
- One FINRA disciplinary event: a 2019 settlement, censure and $40,000 fine for failing to file twenty private placement memoranda in 2017, in the business line that is now the firm's main one


## What this means for your decision.

| Topic | Finding |
| --- | --- |
|  | The channel that is open to you was inactive on the day of this review |
|  | Registering and answering the questionnaire does not show you anything |
|  | The fee is not on the website, but it is in every filing, and it changed |
|  | What you bought was usually a Crowd Note, not stock |

MicroVentures is a FINRA-member broker-dealer that has been arranging private placements since 2009 and is comfortably capitalized, with net capital of $4,238,994 against a $250,000 minimum. Its Regulation Crowdfunding issuers file annual reports more often than the market does, and that holds up when measured issuer by issuer, which is a genuine mark in its favor. The reservations are about what the platform is and what it says. BrokerCheck records its business as private placements and private company stock transactions, and its crowdfunding filings have fallen to four offerings in 2025 with none open on its own feed. The company publishes two materially different lifetime capital figures on its two websites with no reconciliation between them. No fee schedule is published, though the filings disclose one on every offering. And an investor who completes registration and the questionnaire is shown nothing and asked to book a call. A capable private-placement operator whose public face leads with a retail product it has largely stopped filing.


## Who it fits

| Investor | Fit | Why |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Existing Crowd Note and SAFE Holders | well-suited |  |
| Accredited Investors Targeting a Named Private Company | neutral |  |
| Sellers of Late-Stage Private Company Stock | neutral |  |
| Non-Accredited Investors Seeking Startup Offerings | poor-fit |  |
| Investors Who Compare Costs Before Registering | poor-fit |  |
| Investors Requiring Liquidity, Income or Outcome Reporting | poor-fit |  |


## Questions

**Is MicroVentures legit?**

On the located regulatory record, yes, with one qualification. MicroVenture Marketplace Inc. has been an SEC-registered broker-dealer and FINRA member since 2009 (File No. 8-68458, CRD 152513), is not suspended, and reported net capital of $4,238,994 at the end of 2025 against a $250,000 minimum, audited by Bauer & Company. The qualification is a FINRA settlement dated December 30, 2019: censure and a $40,000 fine for failing to make the required private placement memorandum filings for twenty offerings between March and August 2017, in the business line that is now the firm's main one. The firm consented without admitting or denying the findings. AltStreet located no SEC enforcement action and no investor class action, though PACER and state regulators were not searched. Separately, be careful when searching: results for MicroVentures litigation often return Microvast Holdings, an unrelated company.

**Can I still invest on MicroVentures if I am not accredited?**

In principle Regulation Crowdfunding is open to everyone, but in practice there was nothing to buy. The platform's own public offerings endpoint returned 145 funded offerings and none active on September 18, 2026, and the company filed only four initial Form C offerings in all of 2025, down from 38 in 2020. AltStreet's editor created an account and completed the platform's investor questionnaire that day and still saw no offerings; the platform asked him to schedule a call. Nothing in the public record shows whether the platform intends to reopen the channel.

**What fees does MicroVentures charge?**

In two places, neither of them the investing pages, whose /fees, /pricing, /terms, /how-it-works and six other pages each return navigation chrome and no content. For Regulation D vehicles, the help center (read October 24, 2026) gives typical terms: a 5 percent placement fee and 1.5 percent offering costs taken at closing, a 0.50 percent annual management fee with two years charged up front and later years charged at a distribution, and 10 percent carried interest after the investor's capital is returned; the Form CRS says each offering memorandum sets the actual figures, adds a possible distribution fee and a $500 cancellation fee, and says secondary-transaction fees are negotiated. For Regulation Crowdfunding, investors pay no fee (Form CRS); the issuer's fees are in the SEC filings, because Regulation Crowdfunding requires the intermediary's compensation to be disclosed on every Form C. Across the 194 offerings with an initial Form C, the commission was 7 percent of the amount raised on 50 offerings from 2016 to 2018 and 5 percent on 81 offerings from 2020 to 2025, and on 126 of them the platform also took 'a number of Crowd Notes of the Issuer equal to two percent (2%) of the total number of Securities sold'. At the issue price that securities interest is worth roughly another 2 percent of offering value, so the cost on most offerings was about 7 percent rather than 5. The fees on the Regulation D vehicles and on secondary transactions are not published anywhere, and the audited accounts show only the aggregate: $4,570,855 of placement fees from the affiliated funds in 2025.

**Has MicroVentures really raised over $550 million?**

That figure cannot be reconciled to public filings, and it is also not the only figure the company publishes. On the same day, microventures.com/about said 'Over $550M has been raised on our platform to date' while invest.microventures.com said investors have 'invested over $700+ million'. The company publishes no methodology for either and no reconciliation between them, so they may be stale versions of one metric or may measure different things. AltStreet could verify $289,281,413 of capital sold through the platform's own offerings: $260,740,526 reported sold by its 999 single-purpose Regulation D vehicles, plus $28,540,887 of realized Regulation Crowdfunding capital across 144 funded offerings. A further $26,076,989 of offering size is reported by 19 third-party issuers that name the firm on their own Form D, which does not establish that MicroVentures placed those rounds. The verified figure is a floor rather than a measurement, for four reasons. Amendments were never filed, so 370 of the platform's 999 vehicles still report no sale on a Form D saying the first sale had not yet occurred, and any capital they later raised is absent from the record. 826 of 848 vehicles sampled declare exactly $2,000,000 sought, a template value that carries no information. The audited fiscal 2025 report discloses $4,570,855 of placement fee revenue from the affiliated funds in that single year, which implies volume the filings do not capture. And secondary trading never appears on a Form D at all. The company's figures are unverifiable, not disproven.

**What is a Crowd Note, and is it the same as owning shares?**

No. A Crowd Note is a convertible instrument that becomes equity only if a qualifying event happens, typically a later priced financing round or a sale or listing of the company. Until then the holder has no shares, no vote and no dividend. It was the dominant instrument on this platform: across the 194 offerings with an initial Form C, 131 sold a Crowd Note and 15 sold a SAFE, against 18 that sold preferred stock and only 4 that sold common stock. Whether a particular note carries a maturity, a repayment right or an outside date varies between offerings, so if you hold one, the conversion and repayment terms in your own instrument are the thing to read.

**What happened to companies that raised on MicroVentures?**

AltStreet classified 179 of the 182 Regulation Crowdfunding issuers on the record; the three without a classification each ran one offering with no filed raise. Of the 179, fifty-nine lapsed in their reporting, 35 formally terminated it, 34 show no realized capital, 33 never filed an annual report at all, 17 are still filing, and 1 became an Exchange Act reporting company. Seven went on to run a Regulation A offering and 40 offerings were followed by a Form D. No platform in this channel publishes outcome data, and MicroVentures is no exception: no realized return, exit or write-off is disclosed for any offering. On the positive side, the issuers that did raise file their annual reports more often than the market average: measured issuer by issuer, 34 of 134 confirmed-raise issuers filed neither an annual report nor a termination, 25 percent against 40 percent market-wide.

**What are MVP LS FUND and MVP ES FUND?**

They are MicroVentures' single-purpose investment vehicles, each an LLC that holds securities of one private company and files its own Form D. LS and ES almost certainly denote late stage and early stage, and the vehicles are numbered in Roman numerals: by September 2026 the LS series had reached 685 and the ES series 167. AltStreet's Form D universe holds 646 LS vehicles reporting $164,954,728 sold and 156 ES vehicles reporting $13,245,255. Earlier generations used other names: MicroAngel funds in 2011 and 2012, then MV Startup Fund, MV Venture Fund, MV Liquidity Fund, MV Opportunity Fund and MV EI Fund. If you invest in one you hold an interest in the LLC, not shares of the company it holds, and the vehicle's operating agreement, fees and carried interest are not published.

**Can I sell my MicroVentures investment?**

Not easily, and not through anything published. Regulation Crowdfunding securities cannot be resold for a year except to the issuer, an accredited investor, a family member or in a registered offering, and that year runs from each investor's own purchase date. After that there is no venue for them: MicroVentures operates a secondary business, and BrokerCheck records it as one of the firm's two business types, but it facilitates transactions in late-stage private company stock at a stated buyer minimum of $50,000, not in the Crowd Notes retail investors hold. No pricing, volume or completed-transaction data is published. A vehicle interest realizes only when the underlying company is sold or lists.

**How does MicroVentures compare to Wefunder, StartEngine or Forge?**

On Regulation Crowdfunding the comparison is unflattering in scale and in availability: MicroVentures has run 195 offerings against Wefunder's 2,902 and StartEngine's 1,674 through its portal, and unlike both it had none open. Wefunder publishes a 7.9 percent fee and StartEngine about 7 percent; MicroVentures publishes nothing, though its filings show 5 percent in cash plus securities worth roughly another 2 percent of offering value, which is about the same all-in. All three carry a FINRA action, MicroVentures' being the smallest at $40,000. On the secondary side the comparison is with Forge, which publishes market data on the private names it trades where MicroVentures publishes none. Where MicroVentures is genuinely distinct is the Regulation D vehicle business, 999 single-company funds, which neither crowdfunding venue runs at that scale.

**Why does searching EDGAR for MicroVentures return almost nothing?**

Because the brand is plural and the registrant is singular. The company is MicroVentures, but the SEC registrant is MicroVenture Marketplace Inc., and four different spellings appear across its one CIK. Searching the plural returns a small fraction of the filings and makes the platform look far smaller than it is. The right identifiers are CIK 1478147 for the broker-dealer and CIK 1683054 for First Democracy VC, the affiliated funding portal that operated from 2016 until it withdrew its registration on January 31, 2019. A third registration, CIK 1511691, carries the same name and address but holds only five of the firm's own Form D filings from 2011 to 2014; it is a duplicate, not a second broker-dealer.


## Update history

**October 24, 2026: Correction: MicroVentures does publish typical Regulation D fees and minimums, in its help center and Form CRS**

This review said no fee schedule was published anywhere on MicroVentures' websites. That was wrong. The help center at help.microventures.com, linked from the site footer as Education, carries an article, What costs might I incur when I invest?, stating that Regulation D and S fees are described in each offering memorandum and are typically a 5 percent placement fee and 1.5 percent offering costs taken at closing, a 0.50 percent annual management fee with two years charged up front and later years charged at a distribution, and 10 percent carried interest after the investor's capital is returned. A second article gives typical minimums: $100 for Regulation Crowdfunding, $3,000 for Regulation D, $10,000 for late-stage secondary offerings. The Form CRS on microventures.com (effective October 22, 2025) describes the fee types (placement agent fee, MicroAngel Partners' management fee, carried interest, distribution fee and offering costs), says Regulation Crowdfunding and Regulation A investors pay no fee, that secondary fees are negotiated per transaction, and that a $500 cancellation fee can apply. The September 18 review tested ten pages on the investing subdomain, which return no content, and did not read the help center or the Form CRS. The fee statements across the review are corrected, the Regulation D minimum is filled in, and the fee transparency input moves from 3 to 5 of 10: typical figures are published and the actual ones are set per offering, the marketplace norm. The finding that the investing pages themselves publish no terms, and that a registered user sees no offering before a call, stands.

**October 15, 2026: Signal sweep since September 18: 21 lifecycle echoes; Apex Farms' 2018 close and its annual report for the year ended September 30, 2018 attached**

AltStreet triaged the 21 signals its monitoring attached to MicroVentures between September 18 and October 15, 2026. All are Reg CF lifecycle filings with dates before the review's evidence. Two approved filings for Apex Farms Corp., whose only Form C is the offering recorded in this review, had never reached the deal and are now applied: the Form C-U of May 25, 2018 and the annual report for the fiscal year ended September 30, 2018 (revenue $7,500, net loss $533,630, cash $13,947, total assets $58,272, issuer-reported and unaudited).


## Evidence appendix

Platform website captured September 18, 2026.

UNITS, because the counts in this review only mean anything if the units are fixed. A FILING is one Form C-family document on EDGAR; there are 696, comprising 194 Form C, 325 Form C/A and 177 Form C-U. An OFFERING is one Regulation Crowdfunding offering; there are 195, of which 194 opened with an initial Form C and one is known only from a progress update whose Form C is absent from AltStreet's ledger. Because Form C filings carry no pointer to the filing they amend, offerings were reconstructed by sequence: for each issuer the filings are ordered by date, every initial Form C opens a new offering, and the amendments and progress updates that follow attach to the offering that is open. An ISSUER is one CIK; there are 182, of which 11 ran more than one offering. AltStreet's internal census stores 239 rows, which is a storage unit that splits some offerings and merges others; no figure in this review is denominated in it. Six primary sources. (1) The Form C census across both of the operator's intermediaries, MicroVenture Marketplace Inc. (CIK 1478147) and First Democracy VC (CIK 1683054), 2016 to 2025, with outcome classification for 179 of the 182 issuers; the three without a classification each ran one offering with no filed raise. Realized capital is the largest Form C-U progress update within each offering, summed across offerings, because progress updates are cumulative within an offering and additive across them. Every one of the 177 progress updates was re-read from its filed prose rather than taken from a stored field, which corrected three filer-mangled amounts ($450.008 and $313.038 using a period as a thousands separator, and '$278, 829' broken by a comma-space). (2) A Regulation D universe built from EDGAR full-text search for Form D filings naming 'MicroVenture Marketplace', sliced by year to beat the 1,000-result cap: 1,692 filings across 1,018 distinct issuers, 2011 to 2026, priced from each issuer's latest Form D using AltStreet's market-wide ledger for the 900 CIKs it covers and primary_doc.xml for the other 118. (3) A capture of the platform's public offerings endpoint, api.microventures.com/v1/queries_public, on 2026-09-18: 145 funded Regulation Crowdfunding offerings and 0 active. (4) Firecrawl scrapes of microventures.com (93 pages) and invest.microventures.com (103 pages) captured 2026-09-18. (5) The firm's registration and financial record: Form X-17A-5 for fiscal 2025 (accession 0001478147-26-000003, filed 2026-02-26); the Form CFPORTAL, five amendments and Form CFPORTAL-W of First Democracy VC; and the FINRA BrokerCheck report for CRD 152513. (6) The intermediary compensation and financial interest clauses read from the initial Form C of each of the 194 offerings that has one. AltStreet's editor also created an ordinary investor account and completed the platform's investor questionnaire on 2026-09-18 to test what registration reveals.

**Highlights**

- Regulation Crowdfunding record: 696 Form C family filings (194 Form C, 325 Form C/A, 177 Form C-U) resolve into 195 offerings across 182 issuers; 11 issuers ran more than one offering. Initial Form C filings by year: 2016:6, 2017:31, 2018:29, 2019:36, 2020:38, 2021:17, 2022:18, 2023:8, 2024:7, 2025:4. Offerings by intermediary: MicroVenture Marketplace under its four spellings 135, First Democracy VC 60. Targets: median $50,000, range $24,995 to $1,235,000. Maximums: median $425,000, range $100,000 to $5,000,000.
- Realized Regulation Crowdfunding capital: $28,540,887 across 144 funded offerings by 137 issuers, computed as the largest progress update within each offering summed across offerings, with every progress update re-read from its filed prose. Median offering $123,698, mean $198,201. Seven issuers ran more than one funded offering, and 25 offerings filed a progress update that states no amount. Largest offerings: Jetson AI $1,070,000 (opened 2019); Tallgrass Pictures $882,961 (2024); Unlimited Tomorrow $870,511 (2018); Oscilla Power $870,847 across two offerings; goDeskless $759,590 (2020); MicroSalt $750,000 (2020); Napa Valley Limoncello $722,978 (2017); Lend Grow $704,565 (2020); Arbit $700,000 (2017); 3DaGoGo $697,276 (2017); ArtCraft Entertainment $668,000 (2016).
- Instruments across the 194 offerings with an initial Form C: 'Other' 168, preferred stock 18, common stock 4, debt 4. The free-text descriptions of the 'Other' category resolve to Crowd Notes on 131 offerings, SAFEs or Crowd SAFEs on 15, revenue participation or revenue-share notes on about 11, membership or LLC interests on 4, preferred stock described in free text on 3, simple agreements for future tokens on 2, and a convertible promissory note on 1. About 25 of 194 offerings conveyed equity at the point of purchase; the rest were contingent claims.
- Fees as disclosed on each offering's initial Form C, the only place this platform publishes them: a 7 percent commission on 50 offerings (2016:5, 2017:27, 2018:17, 2024:1), a 5 percent commission on 81 offerings (2017:2, 2018:1, 2020:32, 2021:15, 2022:16, 2023:7, 2024:4, 2025:4), and scattered rates of 6, 6.5, 4, 3, 2.9 and 2 percent on 12 more, with 5 offerings using wording that states no rate. On 126 of the 194 the intermediary also takes 'a number of Crowd Notes of the Issuer equal to two percent (2%) of the total number of Securities sold', which at the issue price is worth roughly a further 2 percent of offering value; 122 offerings carry both a cash percentage and the securities interest. In 2019 all 36 offerings state that no cash commission is owed, 31 in the form 'the issuer will not owe a commission' and 5 stating a zero amount, and none of the 36 records a securities interest. All 36 name the broker-dealer rather than the portal, consistent with First Democracy VC having withdrawn its portal registration on 2019-01-31; AltStreet notes the coincidence and does not assert a cause.
- Issuer outcomes across the 179 issuers AltStreet could classify: lapsed filing 59; terminated other 35; no realized capital 34; never filed an annual report 33; still filing 17; terminated as a reporting company 1. The three unclassified issuers each ran one offering with no filed raise. Separately, 35 offerings show a Form C-TR, 7 issuers went on to run a Regulation A offering, 40 are followed by a Form D (83 filings in total), and 1 issuer is a public company today.
- Annual-report compliance, measured at the ISSUER level because Rule 202 places the obligation on the issuer rather than on each offering: of the 134 issuers with a confirmed raise whose first funded offering opened before 2025, 100 filed at least one Form C-AR and 35 filed a Form C-TR; 34 filed neither, a 25 percent gap against 40 percent market-wide on the same issuer-level test. The result is stable at a 2024 cutoff (33 of 130, also 25 percent). An offering-level denominator would have counted the seven issuers with two funded offerings twice, so it is not used. AltStreet's census records the existence of these annual reports but not their financial contents for this platform, so no issuer revenue figure is claimed here.
- Regulation D universe: 1,692 Form D filings naming 'MicroVenture Marketplace' across 1,018 distinct issuers, 2011 to 2026, built by slicing EDGAR full-text search by year to beat the 1,000-result cap. Filings by year: 2011:8, 2012:16, 2013:42, 2014:64, 2015:124, 2016:182, 2017:141, 2018:82, 2019:102, 2020:123, 2021:186, 2022:152, 2023:109, 2024:140, 2025:118, 2026:103 to date. Of the 1,018 issuers, 999 are the platform's own single-purpose vehicles and 19 are outside operating companies that name the broker on their own Form D.
- Regulation D amounts, and what they do and do not represent. The platform's own vehicles report $260,740,526 sold across 999 issuers and 15,282 investor positions. By family: MVP LS FUND 646 issuers $164,954,728; MV Liquidity Fund 39 $35,055,000; MV Startup Fund 52 $14,693,000; MVP ES FUND 156 $13,245,255; other MV vehicles 62 $10,737,543; MicroAngel 21 $5,983,000; MicroVentures itself 4 $4,357,000; MV EI Fund 4 $4,264,000; MV Opportunity Fund 3 $4,180,000; MV Venture Fund 12 $3,271,000. Separately, the 19 outside issuers report $26,076,989, which is the full size of their own offerings and does not establish that MicroVentures placed those rounds; the largest is Art Craft Entertainment at $11,711,242 on 2020-01-27, an issuer that had also raised $668,000 through the platform's Regulation Crowdfunding channel in 2016. The figure this review uses for capital sold through the platform's own offerings is therefore $260,740,526 plus $28,540,887 of Regulation Crowdfunding, or $289,281,413; adding the third-party offering size gives $315,358,402 on the widest reading.
- WHY THE REGULATION D FIGURE IS A FLOOR: 370 of the 999 vehicles report no sale on their latest Form D, and the ones examined in detail state that the first sale had not yet occurred and were never amended, so any capital they later raised is absent from the record. 826 of 848 vehicles sampled declare exactly $2,000,000 as the amount sought, a template value that carries no information, which is why no 'amount sought' total appears in this review. Note 5 of the audited fiscal 2025 report discloses $4,570,855 of placement fee revenue from the affiliated funds in that single year, which implies transaction volume the Form D record does not capture. And secondary trading, one of the firm's two BrokerCheck-recorded business lines, would never appear on a Form D at all. The company's figures are therefore unverifiable rather than disproven. A first pass that matched vehicle names by pattern rather than by full-text search reached only $173,476,013, missing the MV Liquidity, MV Opportunity and MV EI families entirely; the method is stated here because it changed the answer by $113 million.
- Broker-dealer financial condition at 2025-12-31 (Form X-17A-5, accession 0001478147-26-000003, audited by Bauer & Company): net capital $4,238,994 against a $250,000 minimum, an excess of $3,988,994, aggregate indebtedness to net capital 0.0101 to 1 against a 15 to 1 limit. Total assets $4,414,112 (cash $4,282,006; investments in privately held companies $86,913, all Level 3; property and equipment $17,814; other $27,379) against liabilities of $43,012. Equity $4,371,100: paid-in capital $5,709,773 less an accumulated deficit of $1,338,674, on 103 shares issued of 1,000 authorized. The firm paid its parent $4,832,455 in 2025 under expense-sharing and platform-technology agreements (salaries and wages $3,820,785, occupancy $476,741, insurance $307,066, technology fees $183,016, communication $12,684, other $32,163), more than its entire balance sheet. Texas margin tax expense $20,355. Note 6 states management believes no pending or threatened claim would be material. Fifteen of the sixteen annual reports on EDGAR were filed on paper and exist only as an auto-generated stub naming a document control number; no report appears between 2020-02-21 and 2022-02-25.
- Registration and legal scan (2026-09-18): MICROVENTURE MARKETPLACE INC., SEC File No. 8-68458, CRD 152513, 2903 E 2nd St, Austin TX 78702, FINRA Dallas office, incorporated in Delaware 2009-10-26, not currently suspended, operating under Rule 15c3-3(k)(2)(i). Owner MICROVENTURES INC at 75 percent or more since 10/2014; CEO William Michael Clark (CRD 5741424) since 10/2009. Types of business recorded on BrokerCheck: 'Private placements of securities' and 'Other - FACILITATE PRIVATE COMPANY STOCK TRANSACTIONS'. Those categories describe the firm's reported business lines and do not limit a registered broker-dealer's authority to intermediate Regulation Crowdfunding, which its Form C record shows it does. One regulatory disclosure event: FINRA AWC dated 2019-12-30, docket 2017052392101, censure and a $40,000 fine paid 2020-01-06, for failing to make Rule 5123 private placement memorandum filings for twenty offerings between March and August 2017 and one late filing, violating Rules 5123 and 2010; consented to without admitting or denying. No SEC enforcement action, administrative proceeding or investor class action located; PACER and state regulators not searched. NAME COLLISION: searching MicroVentures litigation returns Microvast Holdings (Nasdaq: MVST), an unrelated company with its own securities class actions.
- Entity structure: CIK 1478147 is the broker-dealer. CIK 1511691 carries the same name and Austin address but only five filings (three Form D and two amendments, 2011-03-28 to 2014-02-19), including the operator raising $1,544,000 for itself in 2014; it is a duplicate registration, not a second broker-dealer. CIK 1683054 is First Democracy VC (formerly Democracy VC LLC), which filed Form CFPORTAL on 2016-08-30, five amendments through 2018-07-03, and Form CFPORTAL-W on 2019-01-31. A naming trap worth recording: the brand is plural and the registrant singular, with four spellings across the one CIK, so an EDGAR search for 'MicroVentures' returns a small fraction of the filings.
- Platform capture and registration test (2026-09-18): the public offerings endpoint returned 145 funded Regulation Crowdfunding offerings and 0 active, split by intermediary as MicroVenture Marketplace 96 and First Democracy VC 49, with the most recent offering window closing 2026-03-17. Industries of the funded book: consumer products and services 24, cannabis 12, restaurant and beverage 12, technology 8, entertainment and media 8, distillery 8, healthcare 7, and a long tail. On the same day, /fees, /pricing, /terms, /terms-of-service, /how-it-works, /docs, /legal, /tax, /investor-resources and /liquidity on the investing subdomain each returned 158 characters of navigation chrome and no content, and AltStreet's editor completed account registration and the investor questionnaire without any offering becoming visible, receiving instead a request to schedule a call.

**Primary source pages**

- microventures.com (home, /about, /liquidity and 90 further pages, mostly blog), captured 2026-09-18
- invest.microventures.com (home, ~80 /stock/<company> pages, /fees, /pricing, /terms, /how-it-works, /tax, /legal, /investor-resources, /liquidity), captured 2026-09-18; the fee, terms and process pages returned navigation chrome and no content
- api.microventures.com/v1/queries_public, aliases Platform.Offerings.Pages.RegCFFunded (145 items) and RegCFActive (0 items), captured 2026-09-18
- SEC EDGAR: 696 Form C family filings naming CIK 1478147 or CIK 1683054 as intermediary; Form D filings naming MicroVenture Marketplace (1,692 filings, 1,018 issuers)
- SEC EDGAR: Form X-17A-5 for fiscal 2025 (CIK 1478147, accession 0001478147-26-000003) and the sixteen-filing annual report history back to 2011
- SEC EDGAR: Form CFPORTAL (2016-08-30), five amendments, and Form CFPORTAL-W (2019-01-31) for First Democracy VC, CIK 1683054
- FINRA BrokerCheck report for CRD 152513, captured 2026-09-18
- AltStreet platform database: 195 offerings across 182 issuers with outcome classification for 179, 145 deal records, 3 platform-level performance records, September 2026


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Source page: https://altstreet.investments/platforms/reviews/microventures
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AltStreet reads what platforms, funds and issuers file with the SEC and what they tell investors, and publishes the difference. Figures are as filed or as captured on the date stated; nothing here is investment advice.