Publicly announcing you were raising money used to be illegal

For most of the last eighty years, there was a rule so foundational to American business that few entrepreneurs ever thought to question it: you could not publicly say you were raising money for your company. Not on a website, not in a newsletter, not by mentioning it to a room of strangers at a conference. This was called general solicitation, and it was simply forbidden. Alejandro Cremades built his own company, Onevest, inside exactly that world, years before the word crowdfunding had even been coined, relying almost entirely on word of mouth and whoever happened to already be in his network.

Then, in April 2012, that changed. The Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, known as the JOBS Act, rewrote eighty years of securities regulation in one signature. Cremades describes watching Onevest catch the resulting wave in real time. The most immediately visible piece was Title II, which took effect in September 2013 and finally let startups say, out loud and publicly, that they were raising capital. There was a catch: only accredited investors, people meeting specific income or net worth thresholds set by the Securities and Exchange Commission, could actually put money in, and companies had to verify that status for every investor before closing.

Title III went further, and this is the part Cremades treats as the real game changer. It opened investing to people who are not accredited at all, which is to say, roughly ninety-nine percent of the population. Where the old rules effectively limited startup investing to around eight million eligible Americans, Title III extended it, at least in principle, to over three hundred million. Title IV did something similar for larger raises, reviving an old, rarely used exemption called Regulation A and turning it into what's now known as Regulation A+, letting companies raise as much as fifty million dollars from accredited and non-accredited investors alike.

Cremades is careful not to oversell any of this. Complying with Title III involves real filings, potential audited financials, due diligence timelines that can stretch for weeks, and annual reporting obligations that don't disappear once the raise is done. By the SEC's own estimate, only a small fraction of the companies funded each year end up using these exemptions, next to the far larger number raised through traditional accredited channels. The law didn't make fundraising easy. It made a previously closed door legal to knock on.

Before you post, email, or say anything publicly about a fundraise, figure out whether what you're about to do counts as general solicitation, and which part of the JOBS Act actually permits it. Compare your options honestly: Title III's smaller public raises open to everyone against Regulation A+'s larger raises that still carry heavier compliance costs, and pick based on your actual raise size and stage. Build the real cost of paperwork into your plan from the start, audited financials, filings, ongoing annual reports, rather than treating compliance as an afterthought. And bring in a registered funding portal or securities counsel early, since navigating this alone tends to cost more time and money than getting it right the first time.