Karsten Wenzlaff, Advisor
August 26th, 2025
Karsten Wenzlaff is a Crowdfunding and Fintech Expert from Germany. He is Secretary-General of Digit[...]
Category Archives: NCFA In The News
Crowdfunding market will be learning process: study
Financial Post by Mashoka Maimona | July 16, 2013
When rules concerning equity crowdfunding are eventually handed down by North American regulators, there will be “spectacular failures” as investors and startups “lose significant sums” in litigation battles, warns a study by the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. But the soon-to-be published paper in the Boston-based National Bureau of Economic Research Conference concludes that crowdfunding’s growing pains, following the first iteration of industry rules, will be smoothed over as new markets emerge as the financing model targets an “undercapitalized sector of the economy.” “There will be steep market curve in the beginning,” Ajay Agrawal, one of the report’s authors, said in a telephone interview from the NBER Conference in Boston. He pointed to Kickstarter’s sophisticated user-based platform, noting “the market will adjust as people go through a learning process to learn from their mistakes.” Crowdfunding pools small contributions from a broad base of private investors in exchange for securities. What remains to be known is whether this type of financing will “become significant or stay trivial” during the trial and error process, Mr. Agrawal said. He projected a “hybrid between online and offline investing” as recognized investors join the crowdfunding platform experiment. The potential for raising equity is tremendous for startups starved of seed capital, said John Wires, a legal advisor to the National Crowdfunding Association of Canada. “[Equity crowdfunding] democratizes access to investment opportunities,” Mr. Wires said. “The job of the securities regulators is to make sure they find the right balance between the risk of fraud and the potential benefits of funding a whole new wave of businesses.” Stringent limits on the number of “accredited” investors a company can sell stakes to without going public means using crowdfunding to fundraise is theoretically illegal — until regulators widen the definition of investors, beyond those who meet minimum income or asset ownership levels. The Ontario Securities Commission (OSC) and the Canadian Securities Administrators are evaluating exempt market regulations to loosen investor regimes and approve fundraising options such as crowdfunding. Last month, the country’s largest capital markets regulator gave the green light to the first online platform connecting accredited investors with issuers — Toronto-based non-profit Social Venture Connection, part of the MaRS Discovery District.
Continue to the full article --> here
Scientist taps into crowdfunding movement
St. Albert Gazette by Amy Crofts | July 6, 2013
Reaching out to find a cure
Barry Barclay has been working to keep a promise for the past 35 years, a promise he made to his first wife Glenna as she lay dying in her hospital bed.
His vow was to help find the cure for cancer, a disease that took Glenna’s life at the age of 31.
These days Barclay, a trained microbiologist, supervises research and development projects involved in cancer prevention at his St. Albert-based company Planet Biotechnology Inc.
He hopes to raise $5,000 through the crowdfunding website Indiegogo in order to cover travel and workshop expenses to attend a conference, the Halifax Project: Getting to Know Cancer, in August.
“This is a meeting where scientists are coming together … in an atmosphere of openness, co-operation and pooling their knowledge,” Barclay explained. “I think this new approach will yield some real breakthroughs, in the truest sense of the word.”
Barclay will be collaborating with other researchers to look at cancer more holistically. He said he thinks an enzyme involved in DNA synthesis and repair – thymidylate synthase – has been so effective in targeted chemotherapies because the enzyme itself is a metabolic switch.
Similar to a thermostat in a house, cells will incur damage when the switch is turned on or off all the time. Barclay said tumours are made up of a mixture of these types of cells and subsequently respond differently to chemotherapy drugs.
“Tumours are now heterogeneous from the beginning, so you cannot have a single therapy that will deal with all these cells because they all have different properties,” he said.
Organizers of the Halifax Project recognize the use of combination chemotherapy, but as stated in the background information for the conference, they will be discussing the use of natural plant compounds – phytochemicals – for molecular targeting.
Barclay said he plans on publishing his findings after the meeting, assuming he can get there.
“It’s very hard, as a private company, to get grants,” he admitted, adding that is one of the reasons he has tried his hand at crowdfunding. “Rather than individual support, I’m also trying to get corporate sponsorships.”
Crowdfunding is defined by the National Crowdfunding Association of Canada as “the raising of funds through the collection of small contributions from the general public using the Internet and social media.”
Continue to the full article --> here
Support Barry Barclay's campaign on Indiegogo --> here
B.C. Entrepreneurs Turn to Crowd-Funding For New Ways of Financing Startups
BC Business by Jacob Perry | July 3, 2013
B.C. entrepreneurs look to legalize financing through online platforms in the effort to kickstart budding healthcare ventures
A quirk in B.C.'s securities regulations has a group of Vancouver entrepreneurs looking to kickstart equity-based crowd-funding for high-tech ventures, a means of raising funds online from non-accredited investors that's currently illegal in Canada and the U.S.
Crowd-funding, or raising funds through the collection of small contributions using web platforms, has allowed online communities to promote and finance their projects, often with the help of social media channels.
B.C. companies involved in this kind of donation-based crowd funding have seen more success so far: Weeve.it, a social fundraising site for charitable causes, was acquired by LX Ventures Inc. in February, and Vancouver-based Fundrazr has helped causes listed on its site raise upwards of $20 million. For the world of crowd-funding, which doesn't promise gifts or the satisfaction of giving to a worthwhile project, B.C. investor Antonio Arias speculates it will be akin to traditional investing with a similar set of risks involved.
Arias is part of a group of B.C. financiers lobbying B.C.'s securities regulators to alter the rules around selling equity stakes to non-accredited investors via online platforms. Supporters of the change point to a tool in B.C.'s securities laws unique in North America that allows such investors to buy equity stakes in startups, but they hope to mainstream it and expand its use.
Continue to full article --> here
Crowdfunding websites trying to cash in on crowded field
CBC News | By Dianne Buckner | Jun 18, 2013 3:36 PM ET
Trying to lay your hands on some cash? Daryl Hatton wants to help you.
Hatton is the founder and CEO of Fundrazr, Canada’s most established crowd-funding website. “I’m an entrepreneur,” he says. “I love the idea of helping entrepreneurs.”
Hatton wants to raise the profile of his site — but good luck with that. The crowd-funding scene is exploding at the moment. The most famous ones, Kickstarter and Indiegogo, have been in the news for both good reasons and bad.
Indiegogo is the home of the so-called “Crackstarter” campaign to raise the money to buy the infamous Rob Ford video, while Kickstarter spawned the most successful crowd-funding effort ever, a total of over $10 million, for Canadian Eric Migicovsky’s Pebble Watch.
Meanwhile, a British crowd-funding site called Crowd Cube has just launched in Canada. If you’re looking to raise money for your business, they want to hear from you.
Hatton is a relaxed-looking guy from Vancouver, who loves to talk about how Fundrazr has raised 25 million dollars for various causes and businesses in its three years of operation. That’s a far cry from the mega-bucks generated by Kickstarter and Indiegogo, but it’s a respectable number.
“We’re just coming out of start-up land,” says Hatton. “We expect our revenue to grow 10 times what it is now over the next year and a half.”
Strangely, almost all of Fundrazr’s campaigns so far have been for projects in the U.K. and the U.S. (“We’ve done what we’re told we’re supposed to do: export,” says Hatton.) His favorite example right now is a campaign that raised $90,000 for a little Australian girl to travel to Switzerland for surgery to restore her voice.
But he wants to generate more activity here in Canada. And he’d like to do more with entrepreneurs — while also reminding them that this type of financing does come with strings attached.
“People think crowd-funding is this great thing that you plug into the sky that gives you money,” says Fundrazr’s Hatton. “But there’s always an obligation to deliver something to the funders.”
He points out that there are four different models of crowd-funding:
- Donations This is typically used for disaster relief, election campaigns, or to help people with big medical expenses. Recipients of the funding are obliged to report back on how the money was used to complete the project.
- Rewards People give money in exchange for a something tangible – a copy of the CD or DVD that’s being produced, a sample of the product (such as the Pebble Watch), or perhaps a discount on the final product.
- Debt Microfinance websites such a Kiva are an example of this, where funders are actually lending money to entrepreneurs and others. (in May Google invested in a site called Lending Club).
- Investment Funders receive an equity stake in the company. This is legal in the UK, Australia, and Germany, among others. Last year, Obama’s Jobs Act cleared the way for American entrepreneurs to raise up to $1 million of early stage financing. Canada is getting on the investment bandwagon too. The Ontario Securities Commission is in the midst of reviewing the rules around actually buying stock in companies via crowd-funding websites.
There’s no question that crowd-funding can go a long way to solving the long-standing problem for start-ups: limited access to capital. But Fundrazr’s Hatton isn’t sold on selling shares over the internet. “We may not go that way,” he says “Equity is one of the hardest ways to do this.”
He’s on the CAPS Council (Crowdfunding Accreditation for Platform Standards), an international group that’s been involved in the implementation of the Jobs Act initiative in the U.S., and says the process is bogging down.
Brokerages have become involved, (how NOT surprising), and the whole process is getting more complicated than originally envisioned. Hatton thinks Fundrazr may stick with the rewards and donations models.
In any case, crowdfunding just keeps getting hotter and hotter. “The traction has been phenomenal,” says Craig Asano of the new National Crowdfunding Association of Canada, which launched last October.
“We’ve had a steady stream of questions and interest.” Daryl Hatton is likewise enthused about all the action in the space, and the many new ways to utilize this access to Internet crowds. He points to a site called Pic a Tic.
Continue to the full article --> here
Why Isn’t Crowdfunding Working for Toronto’s Food Industry?
Torontoist | By Jess Davidson |
Crowdfunding campaigns have bankrolled movies, books, and other products, but Toronto restaurateurs are having a hard time tapping in.
Ashley Jacot De Boinod did everything right when she was trying to get her doughnut business off the ground. She kept costs low by renting a shared commercial kitchen space. She gained an almost rabid following for her handmade gourmet pastries, cheekily called Glory Hole Doughnuts. She sold her doughnuts wholesale in coffee shops and local businesses across the city, and met customers in the early morning to drop off custom orders. Once she could see that her business would be viable, she embarked on the expensive and onerous process of setting up a store. That’s when things started to go wrong.
“Our budget collapsed when we were so close to finishing up, so I had to figure out something to keep going,” she says.
It wasn’t until the store was near completion that contractor issues arouse. As Jacot De Boinod describes it, she got “screwed over.” At a point when it was too late to back out, she needed a plan to secure some extra funding in order to get the store ready for opening. She settled on an untraditional course of action: a campaign on the popular crowdfunding site Indiegogo.
“I didn’t want to [turn to crowdfunding] at all,” Jacot De Boinod says. “You think you have everything planned, and everything budgeted, so it feels like, ‘Where did you go wrong?’”
While today Jacot De Boinod’s business is up and running—booming, actually, with lineups out the door each weekend for her unique creations (think meat and alcohol ingredients, along with more traditional options) that sell for up to $4 a pop—she was unable to meet her Indiegogo campaign goal of $15,000 when trying to set up shop. Having raised less than half, she ended up borrowing from family to finish the job.
“It’s difficult for many Toronto businesses to meet their goals,” she concedes.
Crowdfunding is an emerging way for startups to raise funds through small contributions from the general public. This is mostly done online, using sites such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo (recently made famous in Toronto thanks to Gawker‘s Rob Ford Crackstarter). Entrepreneurs can use social media to boost interest in their campaigns. Contributers are usually rewarded with different “perks,” which can range from mere shows of gratitude to actual, physical products.
Overall, it seems to be working. Globally, crowdfunding platforms raised $2.7 billion and successfully funded more than 1 million campaigns in 2012, according to an industry report released in April of this year.
But is crowdfunding right for Toronto’s food and beverage industry? Let’s review a few examples:
Company: Market 707
Goal: $14,500 to build an outdoor patio and portable stage for outdoor events.
Funds raised: $6,500Company: The Real Jerk
Goal: $2,450 to create a photographic mural at its new location, 625 Queen Street East.
Funds raised: $876Company: The Gravy Train
Goal: $20,000 towards building a restaurant from scratch, buying equipment, and covering rental costs.
Funds raised: $3,525
Judging by those results, the answer seems to be “no.” But why?
According to Brock Murray, a board member of the National Crowdfunding Association of Canada, the problem may be with the structure of the system. Currently, “equity-based” crowdfunding is not legally allowed in Canada. This means that while projects can raise money in exchange for an ownership stake from accredited investors, anyone who isn’t accredited (meaning, most crowdfunding contributors) can’t invest in return for equity. Someone who solicits funds can only offer products or services in return.
“Projects on Kickstarter.com, for example, had early success because a lot of projects were creative projects,” Murray says. He explains that reward-based crowdfunding allowed artists to fund their projects in return for a finished copy of the product. A director could ask contributers to chip in $25 and in return provide a DVD of the movie after it was finished.
“Because the art community was an early adopter of crowdfunding, they had excellent marketing pitches in the form of videos,” says Brock. “Some would give a trailer to the movie they wanted to make, [and] you and I both know video can be very compelling when done well.”
According to Murray—who is also the CEO of JOI Media, the creator of some crowdfunding software called Katipult—the projects that tend to do best are passion projects, such as documentaries or independent films, or projects that have been initiated by groups or individuals with solid project plans. It doesn’t seem to work as well for food and beverage companies.
Taking Glory Hole as an example, Murray says it would make a lot of sense for equity-based crowdfunding, but on a rewards-based platform, the incentives of food and beverage don’t work quite as well. People can get doughnuts already; there’s no reason for them to give money to an operator who can’t immediately provide them with a pastry in return.
“I’d rather go to Groupon or another similar site and get instant gratification,” he says.
Continue to full article --> here
Rob Ford Crackstarter Campaign A ‘Reputational Risk’ To Fledgling Crowdfunding Industry
Huff Post | Sunny Freeman | Last Updated: 05/24/2013 11:45 am EDT
In Canada, regulators are further behind, though crowdfunding has grown rapidly – from 17 portals to more than 50 in less than a year. The industry is so new that many Canadians are unclear about its legitimacy, said Craig Asano, executive director of the National Crowdfunding Association of Canada, an industry group started last October.
“People call us all the time,” he said, “and their first question is: Is it legal?”
Gerard Adderley donated $25 to an online campaign that aims to raise $200,000 for enterprising drug dealers because he believes the public deserves to see a video of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford allegedly smoking crack cocaine.
His contribution is only a fraction of what has been raised, but, along with 6,000 others, the Torontonian is contributing to a groundbreaking exercise in democratic capitalism that could have very public ramifications for the nascent crowdfunding industry.
“There are pros and cons, but at the end of the day what I think makes a fantastic story is that ultimately if this video comes to light it will not have been a news organization, per se, that paid for it, it will be the people,” the 41-year-old art director said.
Adderley believes that the video, which Ford has dismissed as “ridiculous,” should be released so the public can hold the elected official to account.
“A lot of people feel this is tantamount to bullying, and my reply to that is: Actually, no, it’s not. This is the school yard coming together to put the bully in his place.”
He hopes the video owners will use the money to leave the city and build better lives. But he also knows that there is a chance they are extorting the mayor, deceiving the public and might never produce the alleged footage.
Continue to full article --> here
Brock Murray Joins National Crowdfunding Association of Canada Board
NCFA Canada | Posted on April 18, 2013
CEO of Joi Media, makers of Katipult, brings perspective of Canadian crowdfunding platform to voice of the crowdfunding industry in Canada
TORONTO, ON and Calgary, AB April 18, 2013 – The National Crowdfunding Association of Canada (NCFA Canada) today announced that Brock Murray, CEO of Joi Media, makers of the Katipult white label crowdfunding software, has joined the Association’s board of directors.
Brock is the Chief Executive Officer of JOI Media, an award-winning software development firm based in Calgary providing enterprise software solutions and related services across the private, public and social sectors. JOI Media has been an active participant in the crowdfunding space since 2009 and has developed Katipult, a leading proprietary Crowdfunding platform for both small and large enterprises and nonprofit organizations seeking an out-of-the-box solution, amongst its product offerings.
Craig Asano, Executive Director of NCFA Canada said, “We’re very pleased to welcome Brock to the board of directors and JOI Media/Katipult to the association. Katipult is a leading provider of out-of-the-box and customized crowdfunding software solutions in Canada. They bring a tremendous amount of marketing and technology expertise to the table and will no doubt provide valuable insights and input as we collectively grow a strong and vibrant crowdfunding industry in Canada”.
Brock Murray, CEO of Joi Media said, “We recognize the strategic value and future opportunities that NCFA Canada is working hard to provide for members and participants in the emerging crowdfunding industry. We are pleased to support NCFA Canada, Canada’s national crowdfunding hub, and have committed a platinum level of sponsorship to assist the organization financially as it continues to grow and develop Canada’s crowdfunding landscape on all fronts. As founding sponsors, we look forward to participating as leaders in the industry and rolling out a series of educational and awareness programming and networking event opportunities”.
About the National Crowdfunding Association of Canada
The National Crowdfunding Association of Canada (NCFA Canada) is a newly formed cross-Canada non-profit with the mandate to be inclusive in providing education, advocacy and awareness in the emerging crowdfunding industry. NCFA Canada is community-based, membership-driven entity that was formed at a grass-roots level to fill a national need in the market place. Members are industry stakeholders (portals, experts, service providers, and enablers), small businesses and entrepreneurs using crowdfunding to fund their initiatives, and investors seeking to learn more and connect with a dynamic and growing crowd. For more information please visit ncfacanada.org.
About Katipult
A product of JOI Media, Katipult is the leading software solution for enterprises and nonprofits in need of an out-of-the-box Crowdfunding platform. Katipult is a robust, secure and scalable crowdfunding software that can be tailored to suit all crowdfunding needs. This white label solution supports all crowdfunding frameworks including donation, reward, and equity-based crowfunding. Chose Katipult crowdfunding software to (1) save significantly on the upfront costs and time of in-house development; (2) eliminate the risks of vendor/project management; and (3) receive a flexible service agreement that covers A-Z. For more information, please visit www.katipult.com.
About JOI Media
JOI Media is an award-winning software development firm. We specialize in enterprise software for optimizing day-to-day operations, streamlining decision-making and driving profitability. In addition to our proprietary software products, JOI also provides custom software development services. Headquartered in Calgary, Canada with locations across three continents, JOI Media is a global leader in enterprise software and software related services. We work with incredible organizations across the private, public and social sectors. For more information, please visit www.joimedia.com.
Source: National Crowdfunding Association of Canada
For more information please contact:
Media Contact
Craig Asano
NCFA Canada
Executive Director
p. (416) 618-0254
e. casano@ncfacanada.org
# # #
