Crowdera, which began as a self-funded venture founded by serial entrepreneurs Chet Jainn and Chaitanya Atreya in 2014, has turned into a fundraising platform that has drummed up $0.5 billion so far. The company, which currently has around 500 non-profit organisations and over 5,500 registered donors across 35-40 countries, is now planning to expand its footprints across Southeast Asia and Japan.
Crowdera also works with start-ups and innovators to help them raise funds for initiatives that could make a social impact. A majority of the funds raised on any online platform, according to Jainn, are done through donor-dipping, or charging commission from donors who wish to use the platform. “But we do not charge the donors. Our model works on a subscription-based fee that is charged from a non-profit organisation that is raising funds through the platform,” Jainn said.
Elaborating on the subscription model, Jainn said that Crowdera has become a SaaS (Software as a Service) platform signed up by global non-profit organisations and corporates. The fundraising is done in a transparent manner, and by providing network support to both the donors as well as non-profits, he said. “We currently have more than 1,000 fundraisers using our platform.”
Crowdera was initially a Silicon Valley-based company and soon expanded to India in 2015. Headquartered in Singapore, it now eyes to expand across Southeast Asia and Japan.On the crowd-funding market in India, the founder of the fund-raising platform observed that it is currently at a nascent stage compared to that of the US. The main focus here is on helping NGOs, filmmakers and innovators raise funds, he said.
Crowdera also aims to monetise from the CSR activities of enterprises and foundations across the world, said Jainn. It intends to simplify and templatise CSR spend to comply with the requisite 2 per cent spending by all corporates as per Indian Companies Act 2013.
Among the initiatives for which funds were raised through Crowdera are: Pathshala Education Empowerment Initiative (to make science more fun and easy for rural kids); Sounds N Clips (for a documentary about Baghuvar, a self-sustainable village in Madhya Pradesh); Prajwala (to help rehabilitate women rescued from flesh trade in Hyderabad); Kohka Foundation (to purchase computers for tribal students) and Good Samaritans India.
The subscription model
Crowdera’s levies a subscription fee on non-profit organisation that is raising funds through the platform. It does not charge the donors