Wishberry, one of the more popular crowd-funding platforms in India’s nascent crowd-funding scenario has raised a $650K seed round from numerous individual investors. Wishberry currently lets you raise funds for projects in the field of Arts, Film, Music, Tech, Gaming, Publishing, Apps and Design
The round has been co-led by Rajan Anandan, MD Google India, and Sharad Sharma, Co-Founder of iSPIRT Foundation, along with 42 strategic investors including leading Bollywood composer Shankar Mahadevan, Rohit Khattar, Chairman, Cinestaan, Mumbai Mantra & Old World Hospitality, SEBI board member Mohandas Pai, and seasoned entrepreneurs Deep Kalra (Make My Trip) and Amit Ranjan (SlideShare).
Interestingly, this is Rajan Anandan’s second big ticket investment within this month itself. He earlier invested in AppVirality, a startup which provides growth hacking tools to developers.
Wishberry plans to use the funds to grow its team across marketing and technology and build awareness for crowdfunding in India.
Wishberry selects projects based on their crowdfundability. Considering the fact that Indians are not used to the Western concept of DIY, Wishberry assigns a crowdfunding coach to guide the selected campaign creators in creating compelling pitch videos, developing rewards, and marketing.
Once a campaign goes live on Wishberry, the project creator has to reach his/her target amount within 60 days, failing which, all the money is refunded back to the funders making it an “all-or-nothing” platform, ensuring transparency and trust.
Wishberry charges a non-refundable fee of Rs. 2,500 for campaign consulting and 10% a commission on the funds raised by successful projects.
Priyanka Agarwal, Co-Founder at Wishberry said,
Our goal is to crowdfund 100 crores across 5,000 projects over the next two years and raise our Series A,In five years, we want to build a community of 3-4 million funders and support 50,000 creative projects on Wishberry.
The crowd-funding platform claims to have a community of 9,000+ funders across 50+ countries and a campaign success rate of 75%. Wishberry is currently India’s leading (and possibly the only) rewards-based crowdfunding platform, commonly referred to as “India’s Kickstarter.”
While crowd-funding may still be at a very nascent stage in India, Indians in particular have been pretty much aware of the global crowd-funding ecosystem. Indians were one of the largest funders on global crowd-funding platform Kickstarter, among countries where Kickstarter is currently inactive. 4,690 Indians contributed a whopping $824,800 to projects on the crowdfunding site in 2014.
