Started: 2011
Based: Cornwall
Website: www.crowdfunder.co.uk
Twitter: @crowdfunderuk
Category: Community Action; Media, Architecture and the Arts

Crowdfunder is one of the UK’s largest crowdfunding networks having launched thousands of projects and raised over £2 million.

Crowdfunder, which was set up in 2011 by KEO digital, makers of rivercottage.net and energyshare.com, enables individuals to take their ideas forward and launch real products, services and community projects with the investment of the crowd.

Early projects include The Bicycle Academy, an innovative startup that raised £41,000, and a kitchen in London called Made In Hackney which raised over £13,000 to keep its eco-community going after its grant funding ended.

Crowdfunder has now reached over 70 million followers - it helped the youngest crowdfunder ever, at only seven years old, raise money for his own cook book and got more than 5,000 children planting trees in their schools through Fruitshare. Recent successes include FC United of Manchester doubling its target to raise £51,000 to kit out its community space and crowdfunding an equity investment, on sister site Crowdcube, of £650,000 in a single morning.

Based in Newquay, Cornwall, the team measures its success not only in the rapid growth of the platform - the team has expanded from two to 22 in 12 months - but the legacies of the projects it helps fund, and the impact these projects are having in communities across the UK.