The Guardian by Dominic Rushe | January 28, 2014

• Co-founder: 'We bring the crowd to crowdsourcing'
• Company will look to make key hires and focus on trust

Slava Rubin said the money would be used for key hires, to expand globally and focus on mobile, personalisation and trust. Photograph: Robert Schlesinger/DPA/Corbis

Indiegogo, the crowdfunding platform famous for financing films, tech startups and the Jamaican bobsleigh team, announced on Tuesday that it has raised $40m in funding as it looks at global expansion.

A third round of funding has raised more than twice the $15m the company raised in 2012 and comes after two films backed by Indiegogo, Dear White People and Life Itself, were big hits at the Sundance film festival.

Co-founder Slava Rubin said the financing would be used to make key hires, expand globally and focus on mobile users, personalisation and trust. Rubin said that within a decade crowdsourcing for projects will be seen as a standard source of funding.

“If the 80s were about desktops, the 90s were about commerce and the 00s were about social, then the next decade is going to be about crowdsourcing,” he said. Rubin said the company now had close to 1,000 competitors but as the largest player it was well positioned to maintain its lead. “We bring the crowd to crowdsourcing,” he said.

Related: How to Write an Effective Crowdfunding Pitch

Indiegogo has hosted more than 190,000 campaigns from nearly 190 countries since its debut in 2008. In the past two years the company said funds raised on Indiegogo have grown by 1,000%. The company’s online platform currently supports contributions in five currencies (US dollar, Canadian dollar, euro, pound sterling and Australian dollar) and four languages (English, German, French and Spanish).

The new round of funding was led by Institutional Venture Partners (IVP) and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), with additional funding from existing investors Insight Venture Partners, MHS Capital, Metamorphic Ventures and ff Venture Capital.

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