Pebble’s Eric Migicovsky jump-started his company by selling 85,000 pre-sold watches and generating $10 million in advance revenue through Kickstarter. Unfortunately, Kickstarter isn’t readily accessible to Canadian companies. Migicovsky’s initial company was based in Waterloo (part of University of Waterloo’s Velocity incubator), and was bootstrapped by SR&ED tax credits. The opportunity to obtain financing was so lucrative, that he was forced to found a US corporation, and move all of his assets out of Canada.
Crowdfunding (or crowd financing) is defined as the collective cooperation of a network of individuals to pool their resources together, in order to support (or finance) the efforts initiated by other people or organizations. Websites like Kickstarter have created crowdfunding platforms over the Internet. According to an industry report released Tuesday by Massolution, just under $1.5 billion USD was raised in 2011 by crowdfunding platforms around the world.
According to the Globe and Mail, the “Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act” in the United States has rewritten securities law to allow business owners to seek capital from unaccredited investors, which legalizes the use of crowdfunding to sell shares to the public. Nick Bhargava, co-founder of North Carolina-based Motaavi (who is originally from Edmonton), explains that no such act exists in Canada, and without a national regulator, an entrepreneur would have to seek rule changes in each of the 13 provinces and territories in order to gain unencumbered access to the entire country, in order to make crowdfunding viable.
Crowdfunding sites are paid by commissions, and the smaller population of Canada makes crowdfunding websites in Canada less attractive buisiness opportunities. For entrepreneurs, the smaller investor base also means that small angel projects would raise thousands of dollars in Canada, when compared to the potential millions in the United States.
To follow are an incomplete list of some of the crowdfunding websites in Canada: