Community Round by wefunder

About

A Community Round is a funding round that allows anyone—including your customers, fans, friends, and family—to invest a minimum of $100 in your company.

Your customers are already your evangelists. Now, you can turn them into owners and give them true stakes in the future of your company.

Immad Akhund

Founder @ Mercury

“It makes a big difference when customers have ownership—they’re aligned with your success.”

Amjad Masad

Founder @ Replit

“I've always found benefit from having angel investors, so why not have thousands of them?“

Why raise a Community Round?

When you succeed, so do your day-one supporters.

Grow faster by increasing your luck surface area. Investors want to see you succeed, and they can show up in unexpected ways to make that happen! We’ve seen community investors refer new customers and hires, provide product feedback, and plug founders into greater investor networks after investing. In the week after their Community Round, Synthesis grew their waitlist by 20% from 5000 to 6000 families, saw a 200% surge in job applications, and hired 92 teachers (about 25% of the teaching team).

Raise faster. Call the shots on your own timeline. For example, when Immersed founder Renji Bijoy was short on runway to pay his staff and VCs were taking too long to close, he raised a $2M Community Round in 4 days. A year later, he raised an additional $7M Community Round in two weeks.

Reward your community. Invite your day-one supporters to share in your success. For example, Mercury and Replit built alongside their users from the beginning—giving them ownership once they reached Series B was an unforgettable thank you.

Show that you can. If you can raise money from your customers, congratulations! Without a doubt, you've built something people actually care about. For LEAH Labs, Ad Fontes Media, Immersed, and many more, their successful community rounds quickly led to follow-on institutional funding.

Actually market your round. Unlike any other type of funding round, you can legally promote your Community Round to the public.

Build a wall of love. Everyone agrees: seeing investor comments pile up in the “What People Say” section of Wefunder feels incredible and never gets old.

Gautam Gupta

General Partner @ TCV

“Fast forward 5–10 years, the way you build a brand or a movement is to allow users of your community or product to be investors and stakeholders in the business.“

Renji Bijoy

Founder @ Immersed

“I'm super grateful that we did a Wefunder round. It allows us to partner with people who will take us to the billions of dollars in valuation someday.“

Lucia Quan

Head of BizOps @ Mercury

“The entire company touched it in some way, moreso than a typical raise.”

Interested in raising a Community Round?

How does it work?

Regulatory reforms in March 2021 made Community Rounds easier than ever before

One line on your cap table

All your Community Round investors are wrapped in a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) so that there’s only one line on your cap table. In addition, all voting rights are given to one lead investor, someone you pick to represent everyone in the SPV.

Raise up to $5M

You can raise a maximum of $5 million from unaccredited investors each year through a Community Round. (Prior to March 2021, the limit was $1.07 million.)

Start in 15 min

You can upload your pitch deck and see if your community would be interested in investing before doing any legal work.

How it all started

We’re Wefunder, and we created this industry in 2012.

It all started with our founders getting Congress to change the laws that made it illegal for unaccredited investors to invest in pre-IPO startups.

Read our founding story in our own Community Round case study: A Decade of Community Rounds

As of July 2022, Wefunder has helped 2000+ founders raise over $500 million in Community Rounds. Over 500,000 people have invested on Wefunder, with a median investment of $250.

Companies raising Community Rounds range from a16z-backed startups like Mercury, Levels, and Replit to small businesses across the country: a fruit and bison bar company on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota; a neighborhood restoration in Chicago’s South Side; an artificial pancreas for people with type 1 diabetes; a literal flying car company; and many, many more.

Our goal is to fund 20,000 more founders by 2029. In all 50 states. From all backgrounds. From coffee shops to supersonic planes. Backed by the people who believe in them.

Press