New York City-based startup Kickstarter, which operates one of the world's most popular crowdfunding platforms, has been accepting backers for projects from all over the planet for some time now - but only people in the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand were allowed to actually create campaigns.
That's about to change "very soon", as Kickstarter has just set up a landing page where people from The Netherlands can leave their details for more information, per the tweet below.
Excited to announce that Kickstarter will open up to creators based in the Netherlands very soon: https://t.co/k9QRhFiREi
— Kickstarter (@kickstarter) February 4, 2014
According to a Kickstarter spokesperson:
The Netherlands has a strong creative community that has shown a lot of interest in Kickstarter over the past four and a half years. We're excited to launch there soon, and we continue to work toward being available in more European countries. Stay tuned!
Whether this means that Kickstarter is gearing up for a push into more of mainland Europe, remains unclear at this point.
It's worth noting that its main rival, Indiegogo, has always prided itself on being open for project creators and backers from around the world - as long as they have a valid bank account.
To date, Kickstarter has helped raise just south of $1 billion for some 55,000 creative projects, from over 5.6 million backers. Last year was a particularly successful one for Kickstarter, with three million people pledging $480 million to projects.
According to CrunchBase, the New York City-based company has raised $10 million in funding from the likes of Union Square Ventures, Caterina Fake, Chris Sacca, Jack Dorsey, Joi Ito and Chris Dixon.
Chief competitor Indiegogo recently closed a $40 million round to fund 'global expansion'.
Looks like the crowdfunding wars are about to get more interesting.
Source: NU.NL (Dutch)
Featured image credit: Olivier Le Moal / Shutterstock
