IndieGoGo founder Slava Rubin says the site aims to take steps to help “more and more people fund what matters to them.”
If you’re talking crowdfunding, the big dog in the room is going to be Kickstarter. That said, there’s no lack for smaller sites offering more diverse funding options or catering to specific niches. IndieGoGo, for it part, is one of Kickstarter’s more prominent competitors and, according to recent reports, it’s looking to grow even bigger in 2014.
According to a recent announcement, IndieGoGo has acquired some $40 million in venture financing that it intends to spend “making key hires, expanding globally and improving the user experience with a focus on mobile, personalization and trust.” According to the IndieGoGo’s founder, Slava Rubin, its new efforts will hopefully help to tilt the global crowdfunding scales more in its direction. “We’re committed to making Indiegogo the world’s funding engine and giving people access to capital worldwide,” said Rubin. “With IVP’s and KPCB’s support, we can rapidly take critical steps to helping more and more people fund what matters to them.”
While we’re sure IndieGoGo’s drive to expand will bear some fruit, time will have to tell if it’s able to become “the world’s funding engine” as Rubin hopes. While we don’t want to undercut the company’s efforts, Kickstarter is already such a big entity in crowdfunding that we could just see it being hard to beat at this stage in the game. Case in point, a grand total of 190,000 projects have tried raising funds through IndieGoGo since the site opened its doors in 2008. Comparatively, Kickstarter hosted more than 130,000 projects in 2013 alone.
Source: NY Times
