Startups can raise $5 million a year through equity crowdfunding right now. Forum participants at the SEC’s 45th Annual Small Business Forum want that number to hit $20 million, a fourfold jump.
It’s a recommendation for now. The report to Congress the agency released Monday walks through what participants, drawn from public and private sectors, voted to prioritize after the March 9 forum: raising the Regulation Crowdfunding ceiling, expanding who counts as an accredited investor, modernizing crypto-asset securities rules, and creating a federal friends-and-family exemption that would override state blue-sky laws entirely.
Growth-stage recommendations lean the same direction: easing compliance costs for small fund managers, loosening the investor cap under Section 3(c)(1), and advancing the INVEST Act. Small-cap public companies got their own list too, including simpler Form S-3 access and a lighter Regulation A.
None of this is binding. The SEC’s forum has floated ideas like this before, and the current $5 million Regulation Crowdfunding cap exists because an earlier round of recommendations eventually became a 2020 rule. History says a handful of this year’s asks, maybe the accredited investor expansion, maybe the crypto framework, will show up in a future forum’s report already done, while the rest quietly disappear.
Congress gets the report; the SEC isn’t required to act on any of it. Nothing changes for crowdfunding issuers today. Not yet.
— Marcus Webb