Kickstarter

Kickstarter
Information
Type	Public benefit corporation
Industry	Crowdfunding
Founded	April 28, 2009
Founder	Perry Chen, Yancey Strickler, Charles Adler
Headquarters	Brooklyn, New York, United States
Notable Personnel	Everette Taylor (CEO)
Products	Kickstarter crowdfunding platform
Website	https://www.kickstarter.com

Kickstarter is an American crowdfunding platform, operated by Kickstarter, PBC, that lets creators raise money from the public to fund projects in areas such as technology, design, games, film, music, and art. It launched on April 28, 2009 and was founded by Perry Chen, Yancey Strickler, and Charles Adler. In the Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality industry, Kickstarter is best known as the platform that financed the Oculus Rift development kit in 2012, a campaign widely credited with kick-starting the modern consumer VR era and demonstrating real demand for head-mounted displays before any major hardware company had committed to the market.

Company background

The idea for Kickstarter began with Perry Chen, who in 2002 wanted to bring a pair of DJs to a show in New Orleans but could not raise the money to cover the risk. He later joined with the music journalist Yancey Strickler and the designer Charles Adler to build a website where creators could pitch a project, set a funding goal and a deadline, and collect pledges from the public. The company is headquartered in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, where it moved into a building at 58 Kent Street in 2014.

On September 21, 2015 the founders announced that Kickstarter had reincorporated as a Delaware public benefit corporation, changing its legal name to Kickstarter, PBC. The structure legally commits the company to consider the impact of its decisions on society rather than only on shareholders. As of April 2025 the company reported that backers had pledged about 8.71 billion US dollars on the platform across more than 277,000 successfully funded projects, from roughly 24.1 million backers. The chief executive officer is Everette Taylor.

How the platform works

Kickstarter uses an all-or-nothing funding model. A creator sets a funding goal and a deadline, and the project collects pledges only if it reaches or exceeds that goal by the deadline; if the goal is not met, no money changes hands and backers are not charged. This protects creators from being committed to deliver a project they did not raise enough to complete, and protects backers from funding a project that falls short.

The platform charges a 5 percent fee on funds raised by a successfully funded project, plus a separate payment processing fee of roughly 3 to 5 percent. A crucial point for hardware projects is that Kickstarter is not an investment marketplace: backers are not buying equity or shares and do not receive a financial stake in the company. Instead they pledge in exchange for rewards, which for a product campaign is typically the finished item itself, an early or limited edition, or related merchandise. This distinction later became a source of friction in the VR community when crowdfunded companies were acquired (see below).

Role in virtual reality

The Oculus Rift campaign

The "Oculus Rift: Step Into the Game" campaign is the most consequential VR project in Kickstarter's history. Launched on August 1, 2012 by Oculus VR, the company founded by Palmer Luckey, it sought 250,000 US dollars to build a development kit for an affordable, wide field-of-view Virtual Reality Headset aimed at gamers. The project passed its goal within about 24 hours.

By the time the campaign closed on September 1, 2012 it had raised 2,437,429 US dollars, about 974 percent of its goal, from 9,522 backers. Backers who pledged 300 US dollars or more were promised an Oculus Rift Development Kit 1 (the DK1), a low-resolution headset without positional tracking that the company shipped to its supporters and sold to developers. The campaign is frequently cited as proof that there was genuine consumer and developer appetite for Virtual Reality hardware at a time when the major technology companies had largely written off the medium, and it gave Oculus the visibility and developer base it needed to attract follow-on investment.

Facebook acquisition and the equity debate

Less than two years after the Kickstarter campaign, on March 25, 2014, Facebook announced an agreement to acquire Oculus VR for approximately 2 billion US dollars, consisting of 400 million US dollars in cash and about 23.1 million Facebook shares valued at roughly 1.6 billion US dollars, with a further 300 million US dollars in potential earn-out payments.

The deal made the Oculus campaign a defining example of the difference between crowdfunding and equity investment. Because Kickstarter backers received hardware rewards rather than a stake in the company, none of them shared in the 2 billion US dollar payout, which prompted public complaints from supporters who felt they had taken an early risk without a share of the upside. The episode is often used to illustrate that backing a Kickstarter project is a pledge for a product, not an investment.

Other VR and AR hardware campaigns

The success of Oculus helped make Kickstarter a launchpad for a wave of immersive-hardware startups. Notable VR and AR campaigns include the following.

Project	Year	Amount raised	Type	Notes
Oculus Rift (Step Into the Game)	2012	US$2,437,429 (9,522 backers)	VR headset (DK1)	Funded the first Oculus development kit; company later acquired by Facebook
Avegant Glyph	2014	US$1,509,506	Head-mounted display	Personal media headset using a Virtual Retinal Display that projects images onto the eye
Gloveone	2015	US$151,608 (362 backers)	Haptic glove	Haptic feedback glove by NeuroDigital Technologies for feeling virtual objects
FOVE	2015	About US$480,000	VR headset	Marketed as the first consumer Virtual Reality Headset with built-in Eye tracking
Pimax "8K"	2017	More than US$2.45 million	VR headset	Wide field-of-view headset whose campaign overtook Oculus as the top-funded VR headset project on the platform

In October 2017 the Pimax "8K" headset campaign passed 2.45 million US dollars and surpassed the original Oculus Rift total to become the highest-funded VR headset project on Kickstarter, though commentators noted that crowdfunding totals alone said little about a company's eventual scale, since Oculus had gone on to raise far larger amounts of venture and corporate capital after its campaign.