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Wednesday 2 November 2016

Well that didnt last long. More bad news from a Crowdcube success Rater Agent







Rater Agent raised £150k on Crowdcube just over a year ago. Now its main man and founding wizard Mal McCallion has left.

In the Crowdcube pitch Mal was Rater Agent. Portrayed as a highly successful entrepreneur who was

 '' a veteran of property/technology start-ups Primelocation and Zoopla,'' and '' Mal was headhunted to join Brent Hoberman, co-Founder of lastminute.com, in an interactive floorplan business which let people build Computer Generated Images (CGI's) of their actual homes with up to 125,000 new furniture items in them. 
Having sold that to Floorplanner in 2013, in 2014 Mal went to run Fine & Country / Guild of Professional Estate Agents .........''
Now we think it is fair to assume from reading this text taken directly from the pitch, that Mal was part of the sale of this unnamed company to Floorplanner. A little research in the right places tells a different story.
MyDeco 3D ltd was founded by Hobberman in 2006 and Fox joined shortly afterwards. The controlling company was By Design (UK) Ltd. No mention at CH of Mal in this deal. He was never a director or shareholder in either company from the records. So we think this Crowdcube text is at best highly misleading.
To be honest the software never did much and although the deal to purchase it by Floorplanner was a share swop we dont think it valued MyDeco at much if anything.
So back to Mal - the driving force behind this Crowdcube funded Rater Agent. Well that was the case for a year post funding. Now he is pursuing other interests as MD of Callwell - maybe he just got bored? Now again he is not a director or shareholder in Callwell. How many entrepreneurs do you know who act as managers at other people's companies?
We were contacted by an irate shareholder, so decided to look into this. Its a bit of mess for 70 or so shareholders in Rater Agent who surely expected this entrepreneurial wizard to deliver a huge ROI for them. Then again maybe his departure is a good thing? We are expecting Callwell to be crowdfunding shortly.




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