Franciscus Alexander Ter Kuile

The State of Crowdfunding: a Review of Business Models and Platforms Franciscus Alexander Ter Kuile

Crowdfunding is a development that recently caught a lot of attention. Over the last years, many crowdfunding platforms have been established and often proved to be successful in raising money. This phenomenon has been highlighted in the media as a new form of fund raising that has the potential to lead to revolutionary business models. On the basis of its increased efficiency, it is claimed that crowdfunding may even lead to a paradigm shift in the established ways of present-day funding. Even so, crowdfunding remains a topic on which academic research is, to present date, very limited. The result is that the concept of crowdfunding is not well defined, which leaves much room for discussion. The scale on which crowdfunding takes place is to a large extent still unknown. This research is of an exploratory and descriptive nature, in order to bring more insight to the phenomenon of crowdfunding.