Starting a business is hard, and getting funding to help it grow can be even more difficult but Boulder-based Kickfurther plans to change that.
Kickfurther is similar to Kickstarter in that its platform allows anyone to back a business by donating to a crowdfunding campaign. Kickfurther, however, only works with small to medium-sized businesses that sell physical products and have more than $150,000 in sales.
On Thursday, Kickfurther announced a $5.9 million seed funding round backed by Grand Oaks Capital, Tim Draper with Draper Associates and venture capitalist Bill Tai.
“Many Kickfurther campaigns are ‘sold out’ immediately because they bring fans of a company’s products and brand to the table to support working capital needs for those products,” Tai said in a statement. “This use case is exploding now at a time when consumers are looking to earn higher returns on their cash just as banks are becoming ineffective at serving this segment.”
Forty percent of the recent funding will be used for product improvements, user experience, operational efficiencies and automation. The remaining 60 percent will go toward growth expenses, including marketing, CEO Sean De Clercq told Built In.
“What we really wanted to do prior to investing a lot of capital into growth was to make sure that we were dialed in on product-market fit, the unit economics and making sure that we have a good user experience for both sides of the marketplace,” he said. “So we dialed all of that in over the last five years and now we’re very confident that that underlying infrastructure is working very well for our key stakeholders. Now’s the time to scale and make Kickfurther a household name.”
In addition to the funding round, John Donovan, co-founder of LendingClub, will join Kickfurther as chief strategy officer.
Over the last two years, Kickfurther has tripled its employee headcount and opened a second office in Buffalo, New York. The company now has 25 employees and is actively hiring. According to De Clercq, the company plans to hire five to 10 new people every quarter for the next year and a half.
Since launching in 2014, Kickfurther has raised about $10.9 million in capital and helped fund roughly 300 to 400 businesses, including Boulder Clean and Pangea Organics. The company doesn’t yet work with regulated products, such as alcohol or firearms, or products that need to be refrigerated or frozen. This month, Kickfurther expects to exceed the $75 million threshold of inventory funded.
Kickfurther is also a Boomtown Accelerators alumnus.
