Everyone has heard about collective financing, right? In Brazil, we say “fazer uma vaquinha” (literally: make/do a cow, it makes no sense, I know…). The word “crowdfunding” means precisely this: crowd- a lot of people and funding- refers to financing, so that is a group of people giving money to someone to achieve a goal such as publishing a book or paying for health treatment.
Crowdfunding campaigns emerged in 2005 in the USA and became global in 2009. In Latin America, crowdfunding sites came up in 2009 and have been growing every year since then.
According to Statista/2023, the global crowdfunding market was valued at 13.64 billion U.S. dollars, but they expect the value in 2028 to be 28.92 billion U.S. dollars. Obviously, Latin America Latin America also has a slice of this pie.
Brazil
Vakinha
The first crowdfunding platform was Vakinha (little cow, literally). Created in 2009 by three friends who wanted to give the perfect gift to recently married friends, the site has developed into a way out for anyone who wants to raise funds for any cause.
“We started doing traditional crowdfunding, collecting money and putting it in an envelope, after the couple asked for money because they were moving to Spain. That’s when we realized how simple and quick it would be to collect money via the internet and withdraw it directly from a bank account, recalls Fabricio Milesi, one of Vakinha’s creators and commercial director.
Catarse
This platform was created in 2011 to incentive artistic and creative projects. Catarse can be considerate a stage for a community of supporters and directors who turn projects into reality. According to the company, Catarse was a pioneer in bringing the crowdfunding model based on rewards to Brazil.
Catarse’s code is open and free to use under the MIT License. Since the creation of Catarse Assinaturas (Catarse Subscriber) in 2017, the company has been migrating this code to run APIs; in coming years, the plan is to enable campaign organizers to customize the project’s website with payment buttons, for example, and, at the most, create their own crowdfunding page.
Kickante
Created in 2013, Kickante is the main Brazilian crowdfunding platform. It has a record for crowdfunding in Latin America. More than 90,000 campaigns were launched, raising more than BRL 100 million in collaborations.
Kickante’s founder, Candice Pascoal was recognized in 2018 as one of ten Brazilian female tech entrepreneurs making a difference in South America, and in 2017 Kickante won the Fintech Awards LatAm.
“I remember talking to professionals from IBM, Microsoft, giant technology companies and telling them what I intended for Kickante, which had a lot of innovation and would make more sense to rewrite from scratch than to complement the old one. They said I was crazy, and that it would be too much work, but we spent a year rewriting the platform and today it is the complete financial marketplace. In addition to campaigns for personal, humanitarian, emergency, and business causes, today we have online stores at Kickante to sell products, Candice said in a recent interview for Projeto Draft.
Argentina
Idea.me
Idea.me was founded in Argentina and focuses on the entire Latin American region. Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Uruguay, and the United States have all joined the platform.
Their mission is to increase social impact in Latin America by supporting more artists, creative arts, and non-profit projects. In simple put, Idea.me is an online community that contributes small (or large) sums of money to Latin creative initiatives.
“We believe that good ideas should be realised, and that access to capital should not be a barrier to this”, Idea.me’s team.
Mexico
Snowball
Snowball’s model is fascinating because companies cannot launch a fundraiser before going through a voting phase, the users decide whether or not a company should join the platform.
Meanwhile, users can purchase shares in startups and SMEs by sending wire transfers, depositing funds, or even making crypto payments.
Instead of asking a bank for a loan, this platform allows people to contribute money to one or more projects that they believe will be successful in the future. In exchange, by investing their own money, these individuals are able to buy shares that, if the business is successful, can result in a profit.
Main photo: FESTIVAL DE PARINTINS NO AMAZONAS, BRASIL - Wikimedia commons.
