Wednesday, October 8

Top Stories

French Crowdfunding Law Goes into Effect — Big news came out of France last week: crowdfunding, or financement participatif as it’s known in the nation, is now live. We spoke with Joachim Dupont of the French equity crowdfunding platform Anaxago to get his take on the laws, and the equity crowdfunding landscape in his country.

OTHER HIGHLIGHTS

HeadFunder Finding Early Success with New ‘Crowdspeaking’ Service

Most crowdfunding platforms offer their users a little bit of social outreach help. These features are fairly standard: Tweet and Facebook buttons on the campaign page, for instance, and embeddable widgets allowing bloggers to post information about a campaign on their site. The team behind HeadFunder, however, decided to go further, and form its crowdfunding platform around the concept of social reach.

Crowdfunder Raises $3.5M in Series A Round

Los Angeles-based equity crowdfunding platform Crowdfunder announced yesterday that it has raised $3.5 million in a Series A round. The funding, the company said, will go toward continuing growing its userbase and the number of deals flowing through the platform.

Friends as Influencers in ‘Get Out the Vote’ Campaigns

With US Congressional elections less than a month away, readers have probably noticed an uptick in political messages appearing on their social networks. While such messages are well-intentioned, they’re typically viewed as somewhat futile. Either a bunch of people see the post, like it, and then forget about it, the thinking goes, or the discussion around them gets so polarizing that it turns off anybody on the fence about an issue. A 2012 UCSD study, however, suggests that the picture may not be so simple.

When Crowdfunding, Don’t Try to Copy Previous ‘Viral’ Campaigns In her latest Rose Recommends column, crowdfunding coach Rose Spinelli breaks down a crowdfunding campaign that aims to pair up army veterans with service dogs, and models the Ice Bucket Challenge in hopes of going viral. Rose explains why she thinks it’s the wrong approach and offers a great alternative.

OurCrowd, GE Ventures Complete First Co-Investment

“We believe we have reached a real milestone and transformative moment in the world of high-tech finance,” OurCrowd wrote on its blog, announcing the deal. “This investment underscores the fact that the startup investment playing field is being levelled — OurCrowd investors get access to the same deals multi-billion dollar corporations are seeing, at the same terms.”

Reddit Gets $50M Investment, Considers Giving Users Ability to Own Company Shares Reddit announced last week that it has raised $50 million in a Series B funding round. The investment was led by Sam Altman, president of Y Combinator, with Alfred Lin of Sequoia Capital and Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz, among others, also participating.