Crowdera, a fintech startup based in California and India, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding as a part of its current Pre-Series funding round. The marquee investors who have put their faith in the cloud-based fundraising platform are - Anil Advani, the Silicon Valley startup attorney, Pramod Jain, Amrendra Reddy and Manish Satnaliwala, angel investors from Singapore, Anand Daga, SME IPO specialist from Central India, and couple more unnamed investors from San Francisco Bay Area.

Founded in 2014 by Chai Atreya and Chet Jain, Crowdera is a cloud-based fundraising platform which offers a comprehensive fundraising framework for non-profits and social innovators to raise funds without any form of donor dippings. It facilitates all aspects of the online fundraising ecosystem including donation buttons, cross-site donation widgets, websites (CMS), P2P campaigns, donation management, and much more.

Talking about the funding received and the support of such industry leaders, Chet Jain, CEO and Founder, Crowdera said “A start-up is either built to sell or built to last. I chose to build a company that can last at least 30-40 years. Hence, I always knew that we would have to put a lot more sweat in the game before we started accepting investor funds. It took over seven years of research and over three and half years of hard work to establish Crowdera as a viable for-profit business model that makes money without dipping into the donor dollars. We are not in for a sprint for quick successes; we are a marathoner. Hence, we believe in building best practices in fundraising which will allow us to help several causes for next several decades”.

The company plans to use the funds raised to propel the early stage growth and amplify the overall impact by enhancing the product, and scaling customer success activities.

On making the investment, marquee investor Anil Advani said, “The not-for-profit online fundraising campaigns are being run on social networks and donations too, are being made on mobiles. The digital era has thus, empowered the fund-seekers and the donors alike.I believe Crowdera will benefit from this paradigm shift and emerge as a leading crowdfunding platform.Most fundraisers need help in execution of their campaigns and here Crowdera, with its value-added services, has emerged as the trusted partner in helping fundraisers chart their journey."

The fundraising platform has already made its mark amongst the fund-raisers with eminent personalities like Social Worker Padmashri Dr.Suneetha Krishnan for Prajwala, Filmmaker Rajat Kapoor, ABBF founder Divyanshu Ganatra, Gurcharan Singh of Tarak Mehta Ka Oolta Chashma fame and Rhea Mukherjee, ex-VP of Radio Mirchi,already opting for Crowdera to raise funds for their causes and ventures.

So far, the company has supported over 2300 campaigns funded by 5,500 donors from 35 countries and currently operational in 200 countries by virtue of its payment gateway partnerships.

Crowdera is getting ready for its series A funding by early next year.

Crowdfunding in India



In India, Crowdfunding is not as popular as in the US, nevertheless there are many new and emerging crowdfunding platforms such as Ketto, Milaap, Impact Guru, Desiredwings, Bitgiving and FuelADream.

In April, Chinas Xiaomi launched Mi Crowdfunding in India to provide a dedicated space to products or ideas that still need money to go into mass production and finally launch in open markets. Notably, Xiaomi’s been crowdfunding out-of-the-box products for years in China, giving birth to various devices outside of the mainstream.


Last year, Desiredwings, a reward based crowdfunding platform, acquired Catapooolt.com to together become the largest crowdfunding platform with various diversified successfully funded campaigns to its portfolio.

According to SEBI, the investment knowledge of Indian citizens is not at par and hence popular models like equity crowdfunding and investment crowdfunding are not so popular in India. Last September, SEBI had asked crowdfunding platform to include a disclaimer stating that crowdfunding platforms are neither stock exchanges nor authorized by the capital markets regulator to solicit investments.
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