A list of 15 crowdfunding platforms in India

April 8, 2017

Crowdfunding platforms in India, though not as popular as in the US are slowly catching up and are playing a big role in fund raising. Crowdfunding is of many types. According to SEBI, the investment knowledge of Indian citizens is not at par and hence popular models like equity crowdfunding and investment crowdfunding are not so popular in India. Lets have a look at the top 15 crowdfunding platforms in India that are helping fundraisers raise funds for causes in various fields including entrepreneurship, cultural causes, social causes, medical causes etc.

1. Bitgiving

Founder and CEO: Ishita Anand

Commission Charged: 6% – 10%

Based in New Delhi, Bitgiving enables people from various backgrounds (artists, engineers, etc) to come together, share their story and raise funds for several causes – entrepreneurial, social as well as creative projects. They focus 15% of their attention in raising funds for medical purposes.

BitGiving has so far completed over 650 projects and notable success stories include projects to help Nepal after their earthquakes, sending an Indian athlete to the Olympic games, a project to help farm widows in Marathwada, and funding two months hospital treatment for a teenager with a rare disease.

2. Catapooolt

Founder: Satish Kataria

Commission Charged: project submission fee: 23 USD plus 10-15% commission of the total funding raised.

Founded in July 2013, Catapooolt has a long list of success stories to vouch for. Catapooolt focuses on project categories like sports, politics, social enterprises and startups apart from creative projects. Catapooolt claims to be the only crowdsourcing platform in India to give fundraisers access to distribution in 300,000 retail outlets with exposure to all their customers.

The crowdsourcing platform has helped 40 projects to raise funds amounting to almost 150,000 USD from over 2000 contributors.

3. Crowdera

Co-founders: Chet Jain, Chaitanya Atreya, Rich Mastuura

Crowdera was founded in Palo Alto, California by 2 Indians and 1 American. It is a global platform for raising funds and launched it’s Indian branch last year in April. It has raised over USD 537,000 helping several prestigious nonprofits, individuals, and organizations. They are currently in bootstrap stage and is expecting to turn to profitability from 2017. They charge zero commission and believe “Doing good must not be penalized.”

4. DreamWallets

Cofounders: Nikhil Agrawal and Manish Harodia

With headquarters in Jaipur and it’s offices in Mumbai and Pune, DreamWallets is an online reward-based collaboration platform for raising funds like FuelADream. The people who back any project in this platform are rewarded in non-monetary way.

DreamWallets help fundraisers raise funds in 16 categories which includes Movies, Theatre, Events, Art & Craft, Music, Literature, Photography, Travel, Tech Product/ Service, Social causes, etc. It has run more than 100 campaigns and as contributors coming from over 200 cities.

5. Faircent

Co-founders: Rajat Gandhi, Vinay Matthews, Nitin Gupta

Commission charged: One-time listing fee of around USD 23 + an administration fee which depends on the size of the loan and interest amount. It doesn’t earn from interest paid.

Based in Gurgaon, Faircent is a virtual marketplace and peer-to-peer lending platform where borrowers and lenders can directly interact and negotiate the terms of loans with no involvement of banks. The startup has thus been able to eliminate high margins on loans and has also achieved low institutional charges.

With 6,000 potential lenders and 26,000 want-to-be borrowers on its platform, Faircent has disbursed total loans of almost USD 973,000 in the last 24 months.

6. FuelADream

Founder: Ranganath Thota

Commission Charged: They charge 9% (2% gateway +7% contract charges) of the total amount collected in any of the campaigns. On the 9%, they charge an additional 14.5% service tax. All and all, the overall commission stands at 10.3%.

FuelADream was launched in Bangalore with 14 projects in hand in April 2016. It is a reward-based crowdfunding platform which focuses on several domains including social causes, creative art and charities. In their platform, fund raisers get two options: AON (All or Nothing) or KWYG (Keep What You Get) and can start any of the campaigns. If any of the AON campaigns fail to achieve it’s targets, all the money raised is returned back to the funders.

Notable campaigns so far include a battery powered e-bike and a canal to irrigate a village’s arid farmland.

7. FundDreamsIndia

Commission charged: 5% on the amount raised, additional charge of 3.95% as processing fees.

FundDreamsIndia is an initiative by BlueBiz Ventures Pvt. Ltd. which helps people to raise funds for personal causes, life events and social causes so that word can be spread quickly about your fundraiser.

Also Read: An exhaustive list of top 50+ seed fund programs in India – 2017

8. Ignite Intent

Cofounders: Rinikesh Shah

Based in Mumbai, Ignite Intent is a crowdfunding platform for entrepreneurs, startups and college projects. Ignite Intent follows an incentive (reward) based crowdfunding model – in which many individuals make micro-investments into businesses. The platform also claims that fundraisers have the freedom to provide details to the extent they want to.

The crowdfunding platform has helped startups like Punexpress, a Pune focused online grocery store.

9. Impact Guru

Co-founders: Khushboo Jain and Piyush Jain

Commission Charged: 5% if user selects Default

Based in Mumbai and founded in 2014, Impact Guru is a crowdfunding platform for non-profit organisations and helps fund social projects. Till now, it has helped startups, social enterprises and non-profit organisations with donations, crowdfunding and investment fundraising. It has helped over 100 projects get funding globally.

It raised a seed fund of USD 500,000 from Singapore-based venture capital fund RB Investments and private investment platform Fundnel in 2016.

10. Ketto

Co-founders: Kunal Kapoor, Varun Sheth and Zaheer Adenwala

Commission Charged: 5-8% of the funds raised or USD 30(whichever is higher) along with gateway charges

Ketto was founded in 2012 and helps raising funds in mainly three categories:

Personal development (Health/Education/Travel)
Creative arts (Movies/Music/Theatre/Fashion/Technology)
Community/social projects (NGOs/Non-Profits/Charities)

The Mumbai based platform offers fund raisers with the facility of cash pick-up and allows fund raisers to keep all the money they have raised even if they have not been able to achieve the targets.

The platform has so far raised USD 5,990,400 through more than 100,000 backers to support over 10,000 projects (averaging just under USD 600 per project). Its partners and supporters includes Google Grants, KWAN, CAP India, DASRA social Impacts.

11. Milaap

Co-founders: Mayukh Choudhury and Anoj Vishwanathan

Commission Charged: 5-8%

Based in Bangalore, Milaap provides micro-cost loans to rural people of the country and help people with lower levels of income with several projects in the field of education, energy and water and sanitation. It was founded in 2011 and expanded it’s plans in 2014 with the allowance of donations and micro-lending for emergency cases, neighbourhood projects, medical conditions, natural calamities and micro business projects.

The platform has donors from all over the world, has raised over USD $12.7 million and has funded over 50,000 projects.

12. Rang De

Co-founders: Smita Ram and Ram N. K

Commission Charged: Interest rates – 4.5% – 10% per annum. Rang De gets a nominal cut of 2% on all the loans repaid by borrowers.

Based in Bangalore, Rang De is a peer-to-peer lending platform that helps rural entrepreneurs with micro or low-cost loans across the country. It was founded in 2008 and a remarkable percentage of borrowers are women, reportedly a whooping 93%. The crowdfunding platform has disbursed 50,008 loans so far and has attracted 9699 social investors. So far they have raised social investments of approximately USD 7 million and have already repaid an amount very close to USD 5 million.

13. Start51

Cofounders: Ateet Bajaj

Commission Charged: 5%

Start51.com works as a lauchpad of crowdfunding dreams. It aims at making direct financial contributions to campaigners from contributors. It follows all-or-nothing funding policy. If you manage to receive the overall funding, you keep it. If you don’t you don’t get the money raised as well. It supports people from all domains starting from film making, music, designing and many other. They assure both givers and seekers that the money has been spent to serve the community better through the project. It is based in Ahmedabad.

This crowdfunding platform is mainly dedicated towards students and is helping them turn entrepreneurs! The platform helps them to create videos and assist them throughout the campaign.

14. TheHotStart

Commission charged: Total platform fee rate- 16.75%

Launched in January 2014, TheHotStart is operated and owned by Blueberry Bay Ventures Private Limited. The platform has helped projects raise close to INR 50 Lakh. The backers are the community members and project creators, in exchange offer unique rewards in exchange for this support.

They have 2 models: ‘Flexible Funding’ model and ‘The All or nothing model’. In the flexible funding model, fundraisers get to keep whatever they have raised. In the second model, fundraisers get to keep the fund raised only if the goal has been achieved.

15. Wishberry

Co-founders: Priyanka Agarwal, Anshulika Dubey

Founded in 2010 and based in Mumbai, Wishberry is a donations-for-rewards crowdfunding platform and funds only creative projects – stand-up comedy, film production, design, photography, music, dance, art etc.

They have a very high success rate of 70% as fund raisers are assisted throughout the campaign on how to make an effective pitch, how to create video campaigns, etc.

Did we forget to include any? Let us know in the comments below!

Source: Pixabay