The New King of Crowdfunding

NEW STARTUPS

Startups that you can invest in with as little as $100 right now:

🩸 Viit - Measures 10 biomarkers 95% cheaper than existing devices (LINK)

🌲 Wild Rye - outdoor gear for women, currently sold in REI (LINK)

⛵️ Windjammer - Renovating an iconic schooner to offer boutique cruises (LINK)

New King in Crowdfunding?

Crowdfunding has matured. Once the wild west of indie gadgets and cult-favorite board games, it's now a landscape where creators, entrepreneurs, and even startups compete for capital.

While Kickstarter built the original stage, we now have data showing that StartEngine is the one pulling ahead and fueling growth in the space.

This would be inconceivable just a year ago, but StartEngine proved that things can change on a dime. I’ll break down the numbers in a moment, but let’s first take a step back and see how we got here.

The Kickstarter Origin Story: Art, Music, and a Missed IPO

Kickstarter launched in 2009 with a clear mission: support creative projects in art, music, film, and design. It wasn't about equity investing — it was about backing something you believed in and maybe getting a cool reward in return.

The idea came to co-founder Perry Chen in 2001 while he was living in New Orleans. He wanted to put on a small experimental jazz concert but didn’t have the money to reserve the venue. He thought: what if people could pledge money upfront, and only be charged if the show actually happened? The concert never materialized — but the concept stuck.

Fast forward a few years, and after teaming up with co-founders Yancey Strickler and Charles Adler, the trio spent years refining the idea and building the platform.

They coded the first version in a small apartment in New York City, navigating early skepticism about whether strangers on the internet would actually fund creative projects.

They would — in droves.

Since then, Kickstarter has helped raise over $8.8 billion for 280,000+ creators, launching everything from the Pebble Watch to the Veronica Mars movie.

Kickstarter takes a 5% cut of every successful raise, plus payment processing fees. It’s a volume game — thousands of small campaigns, many under $50K, generating consistent, low-friction revenue.

Growth hasn’t just stalled - revenues have fallen every year since 2021.

_{*Kickstarter has put out contradicting data for 2024 - this report says 2024 had $725M in funding whereas this report indicates it was $706M. Regardless, funding has dropped ~$100M from the height of 2021, so the overall story remains the same.}

Enter StartEngine: Smaller Volume, Bigger Ambition

Now let’s contrast that with StartEngine, the equity crowdfunding juggernaut.

Despite doing far less in overall investment volume than Kickstarter, StartEngine’s Q1 2025 revenue alone hit $30.4M — nearly matching Kickstarter’s entire annual revenue.

Let’s run the numbers:

• Kickstarter: $706M raised/year x ~5% = ~$35M in annual revenue (plus processing fees)

• StartEngine Q1: Reported $30.4M in revenue — on track for $120M+ annually if trends hold

And the trends do appear to be holding - the surge in StartEngine revenue is mainly attributable to StartEngine Private, their semi-new offering where they sell allocations in highly sought-after startups (like Open AI) to accredited investors.

A member of a crowdfunding Discord chat room I’m in tracks revenue for Private (shoutout Brian!) - according to his estimates Q2 is coming in even hotter than Q1, and the quarter hasn’t even ended yet.

This is a remarkable growth trajectory, and a ‘passing-the-torch’ moment.

Kickstarter may still see more dollars flow through its platform, but StartEngine takes a larger bite out of every deal. Plus, StartEngine layers in multiple revenue streams: fees from issuers, monthly investor memberships, and even secondary trading via StartEngine Secondary.

Brand Power vs. Market Momentum

Kickstarter undeniably has the stronger brand. Ask a stranger on the street if they’ve heard of Kickstarter? Odds are high. StartEngine? Not so much just yet.

Kickstarter also boasts a much larger user base. 2023 saw 2.6M backers pledge money to creators, it’s still the go-to name in rewards-based crowdfunding.

But StartEngine is increasingly taking up oxygen in the space — and doing it from the opposite side of wealth spectrum. They’re seeing remarkable success with accredited investors, which will trickle down into making inroads with retail investors.

I believe the tides of consumer sentiment are changing - consumers want equity. They want upside. And increasingly, they want platforms that treat them like real investors.

We’ll see how this plays out, but at the moment I am feeling really optimistic about my 31,140 shares of StartEngine equity.