As we stated about Crowdfunding in our earlier article also, let’s dig some deeper into this way of raising money for any of the cause either social, personal or for startups and see the Crowdfunding websites.

Crowdfunding is to fund a project or venture by raising small amounts of money from a large number of people via. social community or Internet. It’s also an alternate way to finance any cause which is sourced from the Crowd.

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Roles in Crowdfunding

The crowdfunding model generally involves three types of roles-

1. Project initiator
2. Individuals or groups or crowd
3. A moderating platform or Crowdfunding websites

Project initiator is the person who proposes the idea or project to receive the funds, Individual or Group or Crowd who support the idea and share their funds to the idea and Moderating platform or Crowdfunding websites are the platform who works as mediator between both the parties to launch the idea.

Crowdfunding has become a medium to fund various social causes, entrepreneurial ventures such as artistic and creative projects, medical help, travel, or community-oriented social entrepreneurship projects.

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Crowdfunding for Startups

For the startups also, Crowdfunding is the method of raising money from the crowd by selling or propagating startup’s idea to the masses or crowd via Internet. Mass advertising of a project or offering outside of one’s immediate personal network is done by the startups or crowdfunding sites. When the idea reaches to more masses, there is probability of getting better crowdfunding.

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Types of Crowdfunding

1. Rewards-Based Crowdfunding

Where individuals or group of individuals contributing to your business get some rewards in exchange in a form of the product or service your company offers.

2. Equity-Based Crowdfunding

3. Donation-Based Crowdfunding

4. Debt-Based Crowdfunding

This type of crowdfunding is also seen, it is also known as peer to peer lending or marketplace lending or Crowdlending (moneybrewer[dot]com/what-is-crowdlending/). In this type of lending, interest rates and certain profit percentage is gained by the lender.

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Crowdfunding Websites In India

Crowdfunding is not always equity based and it is an easy tool to increase the visibility of the startup as well as raise the capital by attracting investors easily through Crowdfunding platforms.

There are many sites available on the Internet that are supporting startups raising crowdfunding. These sites works a deal with the syndication group to be the intermediary in helping startups raise capital.

1. Impact Guru-  Founded by Khushboo Jain and Piyush Jain as a crowdfunding platform for non-profit organizations in 2014, Impact Guru is a Harvard iLab incubated fintech platform based in Mumbai which helps individuals, non-profits, social enterprises, startups, corporate for their fundraising needs. It engages in donations, rewards crowdfunding and investment fundraising. In 2016, it had raised a seed round of $500,000 from Singapore-based venture capital fund RB Investments and private investment platform Fundnel.
2.  Milaap–  Founded by Mayukh Choudhury and Anoj Vishwanathan in 2011 in Bengaluru as a crowdfunding platform for micro-loans for people in rural India, helping low-income borrowers with projects such as education, energy and water and sanitation. Milaap added donations on its portfolio in 2014 and now allows donations and micro-lending for emergencies, neighborhood projects, medical conditions, natural calamities and micro business projects. They have so far raised INR 430.67 crores in crowdfunding.
3. Crowdera- Founded by Chet Jain, Chaitanya Atreya, Rich Mastuura in 2014 in Palo Alto, California. It is a completely free global crowdfunding platform that launched for Indian fund raisers recently in April 2016. In June, 2018 Crowdera raised Pre-Series A funding.
4. Catapooolt- Founded by Satish Kataria in 2013, offers three unique tier rewards to its contributors, and claims to be the only crowdfunding platform that gives fundraisers access to distribution in 300,000 retail outlets with exposure to their walk-in customers across India.
5. Bitgiving– Founded in 2013 by Ishita Anand in Delhi, as a crowdfunding platform that enables artists, engineers, and creators of all kinds to come together in a bid to share their stories and raise funds online for entrepreneurial, creative and social projects.
6. FuelADream- Founded by Ranganath Thota in 2016 in Bengaluru as a rewards-based crowdfunding platform that focuses on creative arts projects, social causes and charities.
7. Wishberry-  Founded by Priyanka Agarwal, Anshulika Dubey in 2010 in Mumbai as a donations-for-rewards crowdfunding platform mainly focuses for music, stand-up comedy, film production, art, dance, design, photography, publishing and theater.
8. Ketto- Founded by Kunal Kapoor, Varun Sheth and Zaheer Adenwala in 2012 in Mumbai which supports crowdfunding for NGOs, Charities, Movies, Music, Fashion, Technology, Education and Health.
9. Faircent- Founded by Rajat Gandhi, Vinay Matthews, Nitin Gupta in Gurgaon as Crowdlending platform where it allows lenders and borrowers to negotiate directly the terms of loans including interest rates and the duration of the loan.
10. HelpMeTry- It is a membership reward-based crowdfunding platform for all innovative content creators in India.