#12 - Back or Bolt⚡

Their revenue was £123.6m in FY25, up 37% year-on-year. This is an operating business with scale.

Gross profit rose 474% to £2.8m and gross margin improved materially, suggesting the underlying unit economics are moving in the right direction even if EBITDA is still negative.

Vaulted customer assets doubled to $0.5bn+, and the company now serves 159,000 active customers - real adoption, not just registrations.

A genuine regulatory tailwind: new US state-level legislation recognising transactional gold as authorised currency, with six states now supportive and Florida the first live rollout - plus a maiden supply deal with the Utah State Treasury, a credible institutional customer.

Product breadth is real: Mastercard-linked spend, P2P transfer, multi-currency support, and an upcoming Silver Spend feature.

Consumer sentiment is genuinely decent - a 4.3–4.5 star Trustpilot rating across roughly 2,800 reviews, with most people describing the app as easy to set up and use.

Management and existing shareholders have committed £2,064,517 to this round themselves - 68.82% of the target - which is meaningful skin in the game from insiders.

The company survived a real crisis (a 2019 hostile takeover attempt via a disputed loan default) and achieved what it describes as a solvent exit, repaying the original loan, all creditors, and administration costs in full - a genuine resilience data point, whichever way you read the episode itself.

This is not Glint's first, second, or even third crowdfunding round. The company raised via Seedrs/Republic in 2021 at a £26.4m valuation, again months later in 2021 at £35.9m, again in a later round at £65m (issued capital), and is now raising at £105.4m issued / £122.9m fully diluted. That's a five-year pattern of returning repeatedly to retail investors rather than securing institutional rounds, at a steadily escalating price each time.

Despite £123.6m in revenue, the business is still EBITDA-negative at -£2.1m for FY25. It has narrowed the loss from prior years (-£4.1m in FY23, -£3.7m in FY24), but hasn't crossed into profitability after a decade of operating.

There's an outstanding £2.5m loan from Stockford Limited at 18% annual interest, secured over the company's assets and not being repaid by this raise - an expensive piece of debt sitting on top of a still-lossmaking business.

Outstanding warrants represent 10% of equity on a fully diluted basis, exercisable at prices as low as £0.0625 - well below the current £0.18 share price - meaning a chunk of future dilution is already locked in at bargain terms for warrant holders, not new investors.

The two valuation figures on the same document (£105.4m vs £122.9m) depending on how dilution is counted is the kind of thing worth reading twice - the company is presenting the higher, fully-diluted-inclusive number as the headline.

The 2019 administration episode, however favourably it's framed, is still a real historical fact: this company came within a contested loan dispute of insolvency once already.

The customer review pattern, while broadly positive, includes a recurring thread of complaints about slow withdrawal/sell-back processes and unresponsive customer service - not disqualifying on its own, but worth noting for a company whose entire value proposition rests on customers trusting they can access their money.

A meaningful share of the enthusiasm in Glint's customer base and online reviews traces back to the gold-bug/"sound money" influencer community (Miles Franklin, Andy Schectman-style content) - useful for customer acquisition, but it signals a narrower, ideologically self-selecting user base rather than mainstream fintech adoption, which matters for how far the current growth trajectory can realistically extend.