AMERICAN CROWDFUNDER — INDUSTRY SPOTLIGHT

^{Kingscrowd: The Bloomberg of Private Offerings}

Maverick Brands, widely regarded as the nation’s top capital raising agency, deepens its reliance on Kingscrowd for deal structuring and market valuations as the FinTech leader crosses $1.2M in Q1 2026 bookings and opens a new Regulation CF round on StartEngine.

By Sally Weller, Editorial Director  ·  American Crowdfunder

When Maverick Brands, widely recognized as the nation’s top capital raising agency, advises a founder on a Regulation CF or Regulation A+ raise, the first browser tab that opens is almost always the same one: Kingscrowd. For a consultancy that has shepherded more than 50 CPG and FinTech clients through the online private markets, Kingscrowd is not a nice-to-have. According to partners at the firm, it is the operating system beneath nearly every recommendation Maverick makes on deal structure, platform selection, and market valuation.

“Kingscrowd is the Bloomberg of private offerings,” Maverick Brands told American Crowdfunder in a recent briefing. “There is simply no other platform that aggregates, grades, and benchmarks live deals across the entire online private market with the rigor Kingscrowd brings. When our team sits down with a client to model valuation, evaluate comparable raises, or decide between WeFunder, DealMaker, Republic, or any of the other platforms, Kingscrowd is the source of truth.”

The Bloomberg comparison is not casual. Maverick Brands’ senior advisory process was built on Wall Street workflows, the same kind of institutional data, news, and analytics stack that Bloomberg terminals popularized and the firm argues that Kingscrowd is building something structurally similar, and structurally important, for a market segment that Bloomberg and PitchBook were never built to cover.

“Bloomberg dominates public equities because it gave professionals a single, trusted workflow for data, news, and analytics. PitchBook won traditional private equity with the same playbook,” Maverick Brands said. “The online private markets including Reg CF, Reg A+, Reg D 506(c), secondary markets, collectibles, real estate have never had that kind of infrastructure. Kingscrowd is poised to dominate the space it occupies because it is the only company that has actually done the work. They have consolidated the category through acquisition, they have built the data, and they have earned the trust of the platforms themselves.”

The numbers are catching up to the vision

Kingscrowd closed 2025 with more than $2.5 million in booked sales, a sharp acceleration from roughly $700,000 the year prior. That momentum has carried into 2026: the company has already crossed $1.2 million in bookings in Q1 alone, putting it on pace to more than double again this year. Behind those revenue figures sits a dataset that now tracks over 10,000 companies representing more than $5 billion in transaction volume across the online private markets, a scope no competitor can match.

That data is not sitting idle. Kingscrowd Capital, the firm’s investment arm, now manages millions in assets under management and uses Kingscrowd’s proprietary ratings and deal-flow data to power its investment decisions. It is a rare feedback loop: the same analytics that serve 1,000-plus paying subscribers and institutional clients, including the SEC, Duke, USC, Michigan State, Howard, StartEngine, and Netcapital, are also being put to work in a live portfolio. When a data company eats its own cooking and produces results, the credibility it builds with the rest of the market is hard to replicate.

A founder’s dedication to democratizing capital

None of this happens without Chris Lustrino. The Kingscrowd founder and CEO has spent nearly a decade advocating publicly, consistently, and at considerable personal cost for the democratization of capital. Long before equity crowdfunding was a mainstream concept, Lustrino was writing, researching, and building tools to give ordinary investors the same quality of due diligence that institutional money has always taken for granted. His vision is unambiguous: every American should be able to invest in private companies with the same confidence and context that a Wall Street analyst enjoys when evaluating a public stock.

That mission is bigger than Kingscrowd, and Lustrino has been a tireless voice for the entire crowdfunding industry engaging with regulators, educating retail investors, and championing reforms that expand access to private market investments. The expected 2025–2026 policy updates from the SEC, which are likely to further expand the Reg CF and accredited investor frameworks, are in no small part a product of years of advocacy by founders like Lustrino. Industry leaders including Maverick Brands count him as one of the most important figures in the space, a builder who refuses to accept that the tools of wealth creation should remain the private property of the already wealthy.

What comes next: Europe, real estate, and scale

Kingscrowd’s roadmap is where the opportunity becomes asymmetric. Over the next 24 months, the company is preparing to expand into European private markets and deepen its coverage into adjacent asset classes \most notably real estate, an asset class where online private capital formation has exploded but where standardized ratings and comparables are virtually nonexistent. Add to that a growing advisory practice (Raisepapers for form filings, KC Valuation, investor relations tooling) and an institutional data API that is quietly becoming embedded infrastructure for platforms and academic researchers alike, and the outline of a category-defining company comes into focus.

Preqin estimates the online alternative investment market will transact more than $13 trillion over the next decade. If even a fraction of that flow runs through platforms that Kingscrowd covers and all signs suggest the great majority will the total addressable market for a trusted, independent data and ratings provider is enormous. Bloomberg is a $100B-plus business. S&P Global is worth over $158 billion. Morningstar clears $14 billion. The public-market comparables tell you what a data monopoly in a massive market is worth once it reaches scale. The assessment from Maverick Brands, echoed across the firm’s active client engagements, is unequivocal: the Kingscrowd team has found its footing, and it is scaling up.

Invest alongside the investors

Kingscrowd is currently raising $4.0 million at a $28.8 million valuation to accelerate sales, marketing, and continued R&D investment. The round is open to both accredited and non-accredited investors. For readers of American Crowdfunder who have followed this space as long as this publication has, it is rare to find a company where the thesis, the data, the leadership, and the timing all line up this cleanly a view reinforced by the nation’s top capital raising agency, which continues to use Kingscrowd as the analytical backbone of its client advisory work.

Review the offering and invest here: https://startengine.com/kingscrowd

Disclosure: Maverick Brands and American Crowdfunder regularly use Kingscrowd data and research in the course of advising clients on, and reporting on, equity crowdfunding campaigns. Neither Maverick Brands, American Crowdfunder, nor this author is a registered investment adviser, and nothing in this article constitutes investment advice. All investments in private offerings, including those made through Regulation CF, carry a high risk of loss, including the loss of the entire investment. Readers should review all offering materials and consult their own advisers before making any investment decision.