Decamel Review 2024: Easy Investing for Everyone

I love to diversify my investments on as many great platforms as possible. In this article, I will review the crowdlending platform Decamel, which I first heard about in 2023. They actually offer a wide range of investment opportunities, from real estate projects to equity financing of companies, so I found this really interesting and wanted to learn more about the company.

As in all my reviews, I'll start by talking about the platform itself and what returns you can expect from it. Then, we'll dive into the safety aspects of the platform. Finally, we'll see how to get started with Decamel and start investing on the platform. Let's dive into the review!

What is Decamel?

As for all crowdlending platforms, Decamel is a financial platform that allows investors to invest in projects, in exchange of payments of interests over time. Decamel is based in Tallinn, Estonia, and was founded in 2021 but started to offer investments in 2023.

As I mentioned in the introduction, there are many different projects you can invest in on Decamel:

• Invoice financing and business loans
• Real estate projects
• Equity crowdfunding in companies and startups

They are a therefore a relatively new platform, however they are partners with companies like Lendstream and Identomat, which are well-known companies that are partners with many other crowdlending companies. 

What returns can I expect from investing on Decamel?

Whereas the actual revenue you can expect on the platform completely depends on which projects you invest in, they claim that the usual returns are between 8 and 14%, with up to 18% yields on some projects.

I checked the projects they already had on the platform when writing this review, and I could indeed see yields around 13%, which is definitely in the upper bracket of yields for similar platforms, so that's definitely some good news here.

Is it safe to invest on Decamel?

The question of the safety of the investors funds is central when investing on a crowdlending platform, as they will be managing all the money that you deposit on the platform and invest it in the projects that you select. When reviewing a new platform before adding it to my portfolio, I look at three things: what the platform offers in terms of guarantees, the company itself (and their team), and finally how the projects listed on the platform are picked.

Risks & guarantees on Decamel

On Decamel, most of the risk is coming from which projects you will actually invest in, which we will discuss more in details at the end of this section. However it's worth saying here that all the projects on the platform comes with a collateral and/or guarantees, that will be used to get the investors money back in case something goes wrong with the project.

They are onboarding with a payment provider called Kevin to handle all the cashflow on the platform during the investment process, which is a very well known company in the field that many other platforms use.

They also have a very strict KYC process that we'll cover more in details when we will talk about how to open an account & start investing on the platform.

Finally, they don't have yet the European crowdfunding license, but they are applying for it and according to the CEO of the company that I talked to, they should get it in early 2024 latest.

The company & the team

Decamel is a company registered in Tallinn, Estonia. As for all platforms as I invest on, I checked that they are actually registered in that country in the official company registry, and they are.

I also always like to check the team of the companies I invest with, especially their CEO. So I checked the profile of the CEO of the company, Dmitri Pavlov:

As you can see, he definitely has a strong experience in the field, having been the head of international lending at a bank for over 13 years.

Therefore, it's safe to say that the company is definitely ran by people with a strong experience in the field.

Projects on Decamel

When I invest on a platform, I always have a very close look at where the projects that people can invest in are coming from, as most of the risks will come from here. 

In the case of Decamel, there are various projects on the platform - from real estate projects to equity crowdfunding, so they need to be analysed differently.

For real estate projects, all projects have low LTVs (Loan to Value), meaning there will be funds available to get the money back to investors in cases something goes wrong. They also sometimes come with personal guarantees from the owner of the project.

For equity crowdfunding projects, it is riskier as you invest in the capital of a company that might or might not work out in the future, but this is the same for all equity crowdfunding projects.

They also use a very strict due diligence process to select all the projects that will then be available to investors.

Therefore, all those points combined makes it much safer to invest on Decamel than on other similar crowdlending platforms.

Getting started with Decamel

Let's now see how to get started with Decamel and start investing on the platform.

The first step is to open an account and get verified:

This was done relatively quickly, and it was all done within 5 minutes including the KYC part. It was really fast thanks to their partner Identomat, which makes the ID verification process really easy and completely automated.

Next, you will have to deposit funds in your account to start investing in projects on Decamel. This is also easy to do as well, with a simple bank transfer.

Once this is done, you will be able to start investing on the platform. That's really easy to do on Decamel, as you can browse available projects from the main Invest page:

When I started to invest on the platform, there was only one equity crowdfunding project available for funding on Decamel, and one real estate project, so we'll use this one as an example.

To learn more about a project, you can simply click on it: 

From this page, you can then see much more details about the project, like the main financial details (including the LTV and yield), and also pictures of the real estate project.

You can also easily get more details about the structure of the loan:

Finally, it's also really easy to get details about the collateral attached to the project:

Then, once you want to invest, simply enter how much you want to invest, and validate your investment.

Note that you can invest from just 10 Euros in real estate projects, which is on the lower end for such platforms, so that's great to get a diversified portfolio on Decamel. However this amount changes depending on the project type, and can be up to 500 Euros minimum on equity crowdfunding project.

At the moment, Decamel does not offer a secondary market or an auto-invest function, however this is something that will most probably see in a near future. I will of course update this review when it changes.

My Own Returns with Decamel

Having discovered the platform only in 2023 it's of course way too soon to speak about my own returns with the platform. However, I will definitely invest in more projects as they become available, and I will of course update this article accordingly.

To sum up, I can definitely say I like this crowdlending platform. What I really appreciate with Decamel is the fact that you can access several projects types from a single platform, like real estate projects and equity crowdfunding projects. The platform provides solid yields, with a highly-skilled team behind it, and is also really easy to use. I would have liked to see maybe more features and projects - but it is a relatively new platform and I am sure this will evolve soon. Definitely a platform on which I will invest more in the future.