Crowdtilt, a crowdfunding platform hailing from San Francisco that helps users fund experiences, purchases, and causes with help from their friends, family, and extended networks, announced today that their platform is now available to Canadians.
“It has always been Crowdtilt’s intent to come to Canada,” said Tim Ryan, country manager for Crowdtilt Canada. The team will be based in Toronto. “We’re really excited to see what types of experiences and causes Canadians will tilt. The opportunities are endless — everything from a cottage weekend with friends to a group outing to a sports event. Not to mention the social and civic applications.”
While crowdfunding has generally became synonymous with raising money to fund gadgets like Pebble and Oculus Rift, it’s also clearly maturing. Consider the funding of offbeat projects like an emoji translation of Moby Dick entering the Library of Congress.
Crowdfunding isn’t just for tech gadgets anymore either: there’ve been quite a few local examples of people using Crowdtilt platform to help friends in need, or just have plain good fun with it. In the past couple of weeks, Crowdtilt helped send five girls on scholarships to Kids Learning Code, organize a mystery chartered streetcar tour of Toronto and helped send Carolyn Van, a local tech entrepreneur recently diagnosed with cancer to the spa.
Carolyn Van literally woke up to the amazing news that a campaign has been set up for her, and cried – happy tears. And that’s exactly the kind of thing you can do with Crowdtilt. Friends helping friends create those special moments and memories.
Crowdtilt was founded by Khaled Hussein and James Beshara, and has already raised $37 million in funding from a group of investors including SV Angel, Andreessen Horowitz and Sean Parker.
Setting up campaigns seems easy and would be a no-brainer for anyone who used Kickstarter or similar sites before. Identify the campaign, set the monetary goal and get friends, family and networks involved.
Right now, Crowdtilt is looking for campus ambassadors, and we don’t know about you, but we might let Crowdtilt take us out for a coffee. Sounds fun.