Approximately 35 states have created exemptions in their securities acts or rules in order to allow businesses seeking relatively small amounts of capital to raise funds locally without undergoing an expensive and complicated registration process. Offerings under these exemptions – typically called intrastate “crowdfunding” exemptions – have usually required compliance with the federal intrastate offering exemption under either Section 3(a)(11) of the 1933 Securities Act, or SEC Rule 147, which allows issuers to avoid the burdens of federal registration as well.
A key element of most of these newly-adopted state provisions has been to allow issuers to use general solicitation to seek investors. However, the federal exemption, together with restrictive historical SEC staff guidance, effectively operated to prohibit internet advertising, and restrict other types of solicitation. The federal intrastate exemption prohibited out-of-state offers of securities, even when those offers were deemed such solely because of their being visible to non-home state residents on the internet. The federal rules also prohibited an issuer formed in another state from availing itself of the intrastate exemption in its “home” state for all other purposes. Other constraints dealing with the issuer’s business activity (such as determining the percentage of its revenue derived from the home state) sometimes complicated the determination about whether an issuer would qualify for the federal, and therefore the state, exemption.
These restrictions, which had not been significantly changed in many years, led to widespread criticism that changing business and legal practices, not to mention the rise of the internet as a marketing tool, had made the intrastate exemption largely obsolete.