GoFundMe Raised $3B For Crowdfunding Campaigns, Company Says

The crowdfunding platform released its second annual giving report on Tuesday (Dec. 13), which stated the company has helped campaigns to raise more than $3 billion since the site launched back in 2010.

The report also noted a few other milestones for the platform, including that it has 2 million program organizers, more than 25 million donors and the number of people helped through its campaigns tripled in 2016.

“2016 saw record amounts of help given and received, and we’re proud of our progress and grateful to our community. But it’s only a start,” Rob Solomon, CEO of GoFundMe, said in a letter featured within the report.

“Looking ahead to next year and the year after that, we as a company have an enormous challenge ahead of us. It’s convincing more and more people that they have the power to change their world.”

Last year, the crowdfunding site scored an undisclosed amount of money from an investment led by a number of venture capital and equity firms.

One thing that has helped the company to scale and set itself apart from similar platforms, Forbes reported last year, is the uniquely personal nature of the GoFundMe campaigns — for any manner of causes a would-be fundraiser deems worthy, while peers, such as Kickstarter, have championed creative or art-centered activities.

Other more recent models have included equity crowdfunding, and activity has expanded to focus on small corporations and geographic reach.

The intersection of crowdfunding and personal beliefs has helped GoFundMe break away from the pack, with a business model that has a 5 percent fee in place, in addition to credit processing fees, translating into a revenue run rate of more than $50 million, which is as much as 10 times its peers.

“We think we can do in the giving space what LinkedIn has done for jobs, what Facebook and Twitter have done for communication and what Netflix has done for entertainment,” Solomon told Forbes in an interview last year.