Social Fund-raising Website GoFundMe Buys Detroit Rival CrowdRise

GoFundMe, the Redwood City, CA-based fund-raising platform for charities and nonprofits, has acquired CrowdRise, a Detroit, MI-based rival founded by entrepreneurs Robert Wolfe and Jeffrey Wolfe, and Hollywood philanthropists Edward Norton and Shauna Robertson.

Financial terms were not disclosed in a statement issued Tuesday by GoFundMe.

Brad Damphousse and Andy Ballester founded GoFundMe in San Diego in 2010. They departed in 2015, after selling a majority stake to an investor group led by Accel and Technology Crossover Ventures that reportedly valued GoFundMe at $600 million. The company moved its headquarters to Redwood City when former Groupon chief operating officer Rob Solomon took over as CEO.

In the years since it started, at least 25 million donors have channeled donations of more than $3 billion through GoFundMe’s online platform.

CrowdRise, also founded in 2010, has raised over $500 million for nonprofit organizations and charities. The platform has over 1 million individual members and works with 20,000 charities.

CrowdRise has become the fund-raising platform for many of the country’s top endurance events, including the Boston Marathon, New York City Marathon, Chicago Marathon, Ironman, and Tough Mudder, along with thousands of smaller events. CrowdRise also serves as the online fund-raising platform for the American Cancer Society, the American Red Cross, UNICEF, WE Charity, and other large global organizations.

“There is a perfect synergy between GoFundMe’s brand of person-to-person social fund-raising and CrowdRise’s expertise in fund-raising for charities through peer-to-peer, race events, and corporate campaigns,” Solomon said in the prepared statement. “GoFundMe aims to be the giving layer of the Internet. By joining forces with CrowdRise, we can offer both people and organizations the right fund-raising strategy for any sort of cause they care passionately about.”

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.