DealMaker Review: What Investors Need to Know About the Infrastructure Behind Self-Hosted Reg CF/Reg A+ Raises

TL;DR: DealMaker is not a crowdfunding marketplace you browse like Wefunder or StartEngine. It's white-label infrastructure that lets a company run its own Regulation A+ or Regulation Crowdfunding raise on its own website, with DealMaker Securities acting as broker-dealer of record behind the scenes. That distinction matters because DealMaker quietly underwrites more Reg A+ dollar volume than anyone else in the market. It handled $292 million in 2025, more than half of all Reg A+ capital raised that year, while most investors have never heard the name unless they went looking for it on a company's own invest page, the way BOXABL buyers land on invest.boxabl.com.

What DealMaker actually is

I want to get one thing straight before anything else: when you're evaluating a raise, "which platform is this on?" and "who built the software behind this page?" are two different questions, and DealMaker sits almost entirely in the second category. The company (legal name Novation Solutions Inc., operating as DealMaker, run by CEO Rebecca Kacaba) doesn't build a destination site where you browse hundreds of live deals. It builds the transaction engine that an issuer plugs into its own branded website: subscription agreements, identity and KYC checks, payment processing, and cap table sync, all running quietly behind a page that carries the issuer's own logo instead of DealMaker's.

The comparison people reach for is Shopify. Shopify doesn't run a mall. It gives merchants the checkout, inventory, and payment plumbing to run their own store under their own name, and DealMaker does the same thing for capital raises. A company that wants to run a Reg A+ or Reg CF offering can white-label DealMaker's software so investors complete the entire subscription process on the company's own domain, never touching a third-party marketplace brand at all.

BOXABL is the cleanest example of this in the market right now. If you're an investor who has looked at BOXABL's foldable-home offering, you didn't do it on a platform called "DealMaker." You did it at invest.boxabl.com, a page that looks and feels like it belongs entirely to BOXABL. Behind that page, DealMaker Securities, LLC, the company's affiliated broker-dealer, is the broker-dealer of record, a role confirmed directly in BOXABL's SEC-filed offering circular. That circular discloses DealMaker Securities earns a 2% cash commission on amounts raised for performing "broker-dealer administrative and compliance related functions," explicitly not underwriting or placement agent services. Amendments to the same offering circular in 2025 show StartEngine Primary was dropped as placement agent partway through the raise while DealMaker Securities stayed on as broker-dealer of record, which tells you something about how these roles can shift mid-offering without the underlying legal protections changing.

BOXABL isn't a one-off. Pacaso, Mode Mobile, Miso Robotics, TerraCycle, and Timeplast have all run raises with DealMaker Securities in the broker-dealer seat, according to Kingscrowd's platform tracking. Add up the volume and DealMaker ranked third among Reg CF platforms by 2025 dollars raised: $66 million, behind Wefunder's $109 million and StartEngine's $89 million, while dominating Reg A+ outright.

On raw scale, in a July 2025 memo to the SEC's Crypto Task Force, DealMaker itself stated its platform had processed over $2 billion in capital raises for more than 900 American companies. That figure spans years and offering types beyond just 2025's Reg CF/Reg A+ tally, but it tells you this is not a boutique vendor. It's plumbing sitting underneath a meaningful share of the exempt-offerings market, mostly invisible to the investor typing in their bank account number.

How this changes due diligence for an investor

Here's the part that actually affects how you should behave differently. On Wefunder or StartEngine, there's a marketplace layer between you and the issuer: the platform decides which companies get listed, runs its own screening, and gives you side-by-side comparison across dozens of live deals in one place. That layer doesn't replace your own diligence, and it isn't a guarantee against loss, but it's a second set of eyes with its own reputational stake in not hosting outright frauds.

On a self-hosted DealMaker page, that discovery-and-comparison layer is gone. You arrived at invest.boxabl.com because you already knew about BOXABL, not because a marketplace algorithm or curated deal list surfaced it next to competitors. There's no browsing, no platform-level "trending raises" ranking, no other companies to compare valuation or terms against on the same page. You're transacting on the issuer's own turf, using infrastructure the issuer chose and pays for.

None of this changes your legal protections. Reg CF and Reg A+ disclosure requirements apply identically whether the raise sits on a marketplace or a self-hosted page: financial statements, risk factors, use-of-proceeds disclosure, and ongoing reporting obligations all attach to the SEC filing itself, not to the front-end software rendering the investment form. What changes is perception risk and the practical texture of diligence. A marketplace listing implicitly signals that a raise cleared some kind of platform intake process, even if that screening is thinner than investors assume. A self-hosted DealMaker page signals nothing except that the issuer paid for enterprise-grade fundraising software. You have to go find the SEC filing yourself, because there's no marketplace homepage doing that work for you by default.

Think about what this means in practice for a raise the size of BOXABL's, where the company disclosed a roughly $3.5 billion valuation while running its offering on DealMaker's infrastructure. On a marketplace, that valuation would sit next to dozens of other companies' numbers, inviting comparison. On a self-hosted page, it sits alone, presented on the company's own terms, with no adjacent deal to benchmark it against unless you go build that comparison yourself using EDGAR filings and third-party trackers like Kingscrowd.

Here's how the three platforms stack up on 2025 volume and structure:

Platform	Model	2025 Reg CF raised	2025 Reg A+ position	Investor-facing discovery
Wefunder	Marketplace	$109 million	Marketplace listings	Browse/compare hundreds of live deals
StartEngine	Marketplace (plus own broker-dealer, StartEngine Primary)	$89 million	Marketplace listings	Browse/compare hundreds of live deals
DealMaker	White-label infrastructure, self-hosted on issuer domain	$66 million	$292 million, over 50% of all Reg A+ capital raised in 2025	None. You find the issuer's own page directly

Source: Kingscrowd's 2025 Investment Crowdfunding Annual Report. Note the asymmetry: DealMaker trails both marketplaces in Reg CF (the smaller-dollar, more retail-friendly exemption, capped near $5 million per year) but overwhelms both in Reg A+ (the larger exemption, capped at $75 million per year as of the current SEC threshold), which is exactly the kind of larger, higher-stakes raise where a company like BOXABL wants full control over its own branding and investor experience rather than sharing a page with a marketplace's logo.

Honest caveat: what I couldn't independently verify

I'll be direct about the limits of what's confirmed here rather than smooth it over. DealMaker's pricing to issuers is not published on its public marketing site in a way I could independently verify for this article. A SaaS services agreement filed as an exhibit on SEC EDGAR shows a sample contract with a $1,250-per-month base subscription fee, effective August 2021. That's one contract, for one issuer, from several years ago, and DealMaker's current pricing tiers, transaction fees, and whether that base fee structure still holds in 2026 are not things I can confirm from public sources. If you're an issuer evaluating DealMaker against a marketplace's take rate, get a current quote rather than relying on a filing that's now years old.

I also can't tell you, from public sources alone, exactly how DealMaker's total take compares dollar-for-dollar against Wefunder's or StartEngine's published fee schedules on a like-for-like raise. The SaaS subscription fee is only one piece of the cost. Broker-dealer commissions layer on top, as shown in BOXABL's disclosed 2% commission to DealMaker Securities, and issuers may pay additional fees not broken out in any single public document I could locate. Anyone comparing total platform cost across all three should ask each vendor for a full, itemized quote rather than trusting any single headline number, including the ones in this article.

Second, and more relevant if you're an investor rather than an issuer, escrow arrangements vary by offering and are not uniform across every DealMaker-powered raise. DealMaker's own help center states that the company does not typically act as escrow agent itself for standard raises. Issuers who need milestone-based fund release, meaning money released in tranches as targets are hit, or who are running Reg A+ raises with minimum-raise thresholds, generally need a separate registered escrow agent or trust company plugged into the stack. That means you cannot assume "DealMaker-powered" tells you where your money actually sits before a raise closes. Check the specific offering's subscription agreement and offering circular for the named escrow or trust party. Don't assume it's DealMaker itself just because DealMaker's software is running the page in front of you.

A practical checklist for any self-hosted DealMaker raise

If you land on an issuer's own investment page and the checkout flow looks like DealMaker's (clean multi-step subscription form, KYC verification screens, a "powered by DealMaker" footer mark), here's what I'd actually check before wiring money:

Find the SEC filing directly. Every Reg CF and Reg A+ offering has a corresponding filing on EDGAR (Form C for Reg CF, Form 1-A and its supplements for Reg A+). Search the company name on sec.gov rather than trusting only what's on the issuer's own page. The filing is the actual legal disclosure document, and it names the broker-dealer of record, commission structure, and escrow arrangement.

Identify who's actually the broker-dealer. The offering circular or Form C will name the broker-dealer of record explicitly, the way BOXABL's circular names DealMaker Securities, LLC. If you can't find that name, that's a red flag worth pausing on, because every compliant Reg CF or Reg A+ raise needs one.

Look at whether roles have changed mid-raise. BOXABL's own offering circular amendments show StartEngine Primary being dropped as placement agent in 2025 while DealMaker Securities remained broker-dealer of record. Amendments like this are public and searchable on EDGAR. A raise that has gone through several amendments isn't automatically troubling, but read what changed and why before assuming the current version of the deal matches whatever you first heard about it.

Confirm where the escrow sits. Given DealMaker's own guidance that it doesn't generally serve as escrow agent, look for the named escrow bank or trust company in the subscription agreement. If a raise has a minimum funding target, your money should sit in escrow until that minimum is met and the offering closes, not in a general operating account.

Check the raise's actual regulatory cap and history. Reg CF raises are capped near $5 million annually, while Reg A+ raises can go up to $75 million. If a company has run multiple rounds (BOXABL has run both Reg CF and Reg A+ rounds across different years, per Kingscrowd's tracking), look at the full history, not just the current round, to see how prior capital was deployed.

Treat the absence of a marketplace as neutral, not negative or positive. A self-hosted raise isn't inherently riskier than a marketplace listing, because the same SEC disclosure rules bind it either way, but it also isn't inherently more legitimate just because the issuer built a slick branded page. Polished checkout software is a design signal, not a solvency signal, and it tells you nothing about whether the underlying business will hit its projections.

Read the risk factors section in full. This sounds obvious and gets skipped anyway. BOXABL's own offering circular discloses that the company is aware of SEC inquiries tied to former-employee statements to a reporter, plus pending lawsuits. That's the kind of disclosure that only shows up if you read the actual filing rather than the marketing copy on the invest page, and it's exactly why the missing marketplace layer on a self-hosted raise puts more of the reading burden on you.

The takeaway

DealMaker's absence from most investors' mental map of crowdfunding platforms is itself the finding here. It isn't a competitor to Wefunder or StartEngine in the way people usually frame that comparison. It's infrastructure sitting underneath a meaningful share of the market's largest raises, including the highest-profile Reg A+ deal most retail investors have heard of. That's neither a mark in its favor nor against it on its own. It just means the question "is this a good platform?" doesn't really apply to DealMaker the way it applies to a marketplace. The better question is who's actually standing behind this specific offering, and the only reliable way to answer that is the SEC filing, not the URL sitting in your browser bar.

If you take one habit away from this, make it this one: before you subscribe to any raise, whether it's on a marketplace you recognize or a branded page you've never seen software like before, pull the actual Form C or Form 1-A filing and read who's named as broker-dealer and escrow agent. That single step costs you ten minutes and tells you more about the deal's real structure than any amount of time spent admiring the checkout flow.

Author Disclosure: Jeff Barnes, MBA has no personal position in any company, fund, or platform named in this article. Angel Investors Network has no current commercial relationship with any party mentioned. AIN provides marketing and education services, not investment advice. Past performance does not guarantee future results. All investments involve risk, including loss of principal.