Last month, we reported that Crowdtilt, the Y Combinator alum that launched just over a year ago with plans to become “the Kickstarter for any group,” had raised $12 million in Series A financing from a group of notable investors, including Napster, Causes and Airtime founder Sean Parker and Path’s Dave Morin.
Today, Crowdtilt has confirmed these reports and is officially announcing the close of its Series A financing. In so doing, the startup is adding a few more names to its roster of investors, which is led by Andreessen Horowitz and includes Sean Parker, SV Angel and DCM, along with CrunchFund, Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian, Elad Gil, AngelList’s Naval Ravikant, Sam Altman, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg, Dave Morin and Justin.tv and Exec founder, Justin Kan. As a result of the round, Andreessen Partner Jeff Jordan (also the former President and CEO of OpenTable), will be joining the startup’s board of directors.
The new capital adds to the $2.1 million in seed financing the startup raised in May of last year from SV Angel, Crunch Fund, Y Combinator partners Paul Buchheit, Alexis Ohanian, Harj Taggar and Garry Tan, and DCM and Felicis Ventures, bringing its total funding to just over $14 million.
Since its launch in February of last year, Crowdtilt has been on a mission to put a new spin on crowdfunding and create a platform that caters to the many types of “group fundraising” one wouldn’t traditionally find on sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo. Crowdtilt co-founder James Beshara tells us that the platform has become home to a wide variety of fundraising, from collecting money for fantasy football leagues, to funding classroom projects to saving a toy store from being shut down.
The new round of funding, he says, will allow Crowdtilt to continue to expand its scope — one that now enables the ability to make tax-deductible donations to non-profits fundraising on the platform. Beshara also said that the startup will use the new cash to double down on extensions of its product, like its new API, which allows startups and third-party developers to tap into its group-payment capabilities.
On the other hand, last month we’d been hearing from sources that Crowdtilt was looking to use the financing to begin its expansion into mobile crowdfunding, kickstarting that initiative with the acquisition of a mobile development startup. However, the startup confirmed today that it has tabled those discussions and is putting mobile “on the sidelines” for now to focus instead on building out the Crowdtilt experience on the Web.
Rather than jumping ahead to mobile, it seems that Crowdtilt will instead focus on beefing up its API, which is still in closed beta, and aims to help anyone and everyone build their own group-funding app, add group payment functionality or pre-sales commerce options or, say, create social fundraising sites. Over the long haul, Crowdtilt wants to become a service provider — to provide the layer that powers crowdfunding applications and services across the Web.
And, with its new capital, the startup can afford to hold back on mobile and take it one step at a time.
*Standard disclosure: TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington is a partner at CrunchFund, which is an investor in Crowdtilt.