CrowdAboutNow operates a crowdfunding platform where retail investors can invest in the following ways: 
In a stock campaign, an entrepreneur issues shares or certificates in exchange for an investment. As an investor you become, as it were, co-owner of the company.

In a loan campaign, the entrepreneur promises to repay the investment with interest.

In a pre-sales campaign, the entrepreneur sells a product or service. As an investor, you pay in advance and receive your reward later.

On CrowdAboutNow you can provide loan, buy shares or preorder product from Dutch companies. 

On CrowdAboutNow you buy shares or provide loans to the companies thus main risk is that the company will go bankrupt and you will lose your money. To evaluate this risk, you need to evaluate the company's future and historical financial performance, the team's ability to successfully develop the business, and the market where the company operates, whether there is demand for a product, the level of competition, and so on. Those are a few risks, but they might differ for each business, therefore it is important that you will perform your own analysis.

Very little happens on the platform's side. Investors are told to follow the entrepreneur's progress on the business's own social media and to contact the entrepreneur directly with questions. If payments stop, the platform first tries to broker new repayment terms. If that fails, it introduces investors to each other so they can start a joint collection case — it cannot file a claim on your behalf, and there is no trustee or collections agent acting for lenders. The recovery record is not published at all: 98 campaigns are in default, but no figures exist on what, if anything, came back.

Very little, directly. Investors pay 0.75 euros per investment and nothing else — no annual fee, no account fee, no exit fee, because there is no exit. The real cost sits on the other side: the business pays a 795 euro setup fee, a 1% placement fee, a 6% success fee (7% for share campaigns) and a small yearly management charge. That matters to you because the platform is paid when a campaign closes, not when a loan is repaid — its income barely depends on whether your borrower ever pays you back.

There is no scandal here, but the reviews are bad. Trustpilot scored CrowdAboutNow 2.3 out of 5 in August 2026, from a small sample of 7 reviews, 86% of them one-star. The complaints match the platform's own documented practices rather than contradicting them: no real vetting of business plans, borrowers stopping payments after early instalments, and investors left to run their own debt collection. A July 2026 reviewer described mini interest rates with no collateral and thousands of euros gone. A blog commenter tracking his portfolio wrote that his CrowdAboutNow businesses were failing one after another. On the other hand, searches found no regulator action, no AFM warning, no fraud allegation and no press investigation — the platform holds its licence cleanly and press coverage has been neutral to positive. The fair summary: a clean company running an openly high-risk model, with reviews written by people who discovered what that model means when loans fail.

CrowdAboutNow is often described as a startup platform, but that is misleading — its campaigns are overwhelmingly loans to established local businesses such as restaurants, breweries and shops, not equity in startups. Also know that the business itself is small and shrinking: it raised 8.9 million euros in the first half of 2026, ranking 11th of 15 Dutch business crowdfunding platforms, with volumes down about 19% since 2024. That does not threaten the licence, but investors in twelve-year loans should note that a platform wind-down would make an already weak collections setup weaker.

Selection is light by design. There are four steps: a personal intake conversation; checks on the entrepreneur's identity, company registration and criminal record; a requirement that 30% of the target is committed by the entrepreneur's own network before the campaign becomes public; and a campaign page carrying the legally required key information sheet. What is missing is any financial test — CrowdAboutNow states that it does not assess plans for substance or financial feasibility, leaving that to the crowd. Only 5.29% of the 32,132 applications ever received became campaigns, but that filter measures campaign-readiness and network strength, not creditworthiness.

The platform was founded by Mark Laagewaard, a sociologist by training, who is still managing director, with Folkert Foppema as finance director handling the licence and compliance side. Eleven people are named on the team page: account managers, campaign strategists, developers and a content marketer. Notably, there is no credit analyst or risk officer on the public roster — consistent with a platform that does not underwrite, but it means nobody's job is watching the loan book. Staff numbers fell from 18 to 16 during 2025, and the company itself is loss-making, though its licence is active and its solvency reasonable.