Crowdfinding platform Indiegogo, which prides itself on its global reach, has raised $40 million (€29.3m) in Series B funding. The company has been very active in Germany, being one of the partners behind the Gründer-Garage contest and localising its platform into German and euros.
The round has been led by Institutional Venture Partners – which recently invested in SoundCloud – and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB). The money will be used for new hires, global expansion and improving the user experience, with a focus on “mobile, personalization and trust.”
Existing investors Insight Venture Partners, MHS Capital, Metamorphic Ventures and ff Venture Capital were also involved in the round.
Indiegogo has built a business model around being a properly international crowdfunding platform in a space where national boundaries can be hard to navigate. It has now hosted more than 190,000 funding campaigns in nearly 190 countries. Money raised on the platform has increased by 1,000 percent in two years and the company employs 85 people in San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles.
Five currencies – US dollar, Canadian dollar, Australian dollar, euro, British pound – and four languages – English, German, French, Spanish – are supported.
Indiegogo founder and CEO Slavia Rubin said: “We’re committed to making Indiegogo the world’s funding engine and giving people access to capital worldwide.”
According to John Doerr, general partner at KPCB, “Indiegogo is playing a central role in the transformation of the global economy,” while IVP general partner Jules Maltz said: “Indiegogo’s flexible funding model and open platform are helping it become the market leader in the rapidly growing crowdfunding space. The company is the Android of crowdfunding – easily accessible and open to all.”
One of the high-profile campaigns which helped put Indiegogo on the map was ‘A Vacation for Karen Klein‘, a school bus monitor in the US whose bullying at the hands of some students was caught on camera in a video which quickly went viral. The subsequent campaign raising money to give the victim a holiday had a target of $5,000 but ended up at a whopping $703,168.