Crowdfunder Signs Partnership Agreement With IBM Watson AI XPRIZE to Provide Equity Fundraising Support

LOS ANGELES, CA / ACCESSWIRE / November 16, 2016 / Crowdfunder, a leading equity investment platform and VC fund with accredited investors, is pleased to announce it has signed a partnership agreement with the recently launched IBM Watson AI XPRIZE, a $5 million artificial intelligence (AI) global competition that challenges teams to develop and demonstrate how humans can collaborate with powerful AI technologies to tackle the world’s greatest challenges. Crowdfunder will support this prize by helping participating entrepreneurial teams that need funding resources by leveraging its funding platform, tools and services. Teams will have access to an investment network of thousands of accredited and institutional investors online.

The AI XPRIZE will crowdsource teams from around the world to compete over the span of four years for a $5 million prize, awarded at the TED 2020 global conference. Teams have until January 19, 2017 to register through the XPRIZE website. For participating teams that may seek early stage capital, Crowdfunder will provide a powerful fundraising solution for teams by providing them access to a network of 12,000 institutional and accredited investors. As an equity fundraising partner, Crowdfunder will also provide additional support to teams advancing after each milestone competition in 2017, 2018 and 2019, and to the three finalists in 2020.

“XPRIZE believes that under the right circumstances, igniting rapid experimentation through crowdsourcing solutions is one of the most efficient and effective methods to drive exponential impact and solve grand challenges,” said Amir Banifatemi, XPRIZE lead for the IBM Watson AI competition.

Chance Barnett, Crowdfunder’s Co-Founder and CEO said, “We are proud to be an equity fundraising partner to the teams competing in the IBM Watson AI XPRIZE and to empower a broader community of investors online the opportunity to discover and invest in entrepreneurs competing to make an impact through the use of AI, one of the most powerful and soon to be pervasive forces of our time. Regardless of who wins, many teams joining the AI XPRIZE competition will likely go on to make important contributions to the field and become commercially successful.”

Crowdfunder continues its rapid growth in equity investing online with its network of accredited and institutional investors. Since December 2015, Crowdfunder has experienced 5X growth of the investment capital committed into startups on its platform, speaking to the growth under Title II of the JOBS Act as angel and early stage venture capital move online. Some of the investors in Crowdfunder itself include Tim Draper, 500 Startups, BAM Ventures, B37 Ventures, along with notable angels Mark Rampolla, Marcus Segal, Mark Pincus and others.

For more information on the IBM Watson AI XPRIZE, visit ai.xprize.org.

About The IBM Watson AI XPRIZE

XPRIZE, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, is the global leader in designing and implementing innovative competition models to solve the world’s grandest challenges. XPRIZE utilizes a unique combination of gamification, crowd-sourcing, incentive prize theory, and exponential technologies as a formula to make 10x (vs. 10%) impact in the grand challenge domains facing our world. XPRIZE’s philosophy is that – under the right circumstances – igniting rapid experimentation from a variety of diverse lenses is the most efficient and effective method to driving exponential impact and solutions to grand challenges. Active competitions include the $30M Google Lunar XPRIZE, the $20M NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE, the $15M Global Learning XPRIZE, the $10M Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE, the $7M Shell Ocean Discovery XPRIZE, the $7M Barbara Bush Foundation Adult Literacy XPRIZE, the $5M IBM Watson AI XPRIZE, the $1.75M Water Abundance XPRIZE and the $1M Anu & Naveen Jain Women’s Safety XPRIZE. For more information, visit http://www.xprize.org/.

About Crowdfunder

Crowdfunder is the leading equity crowdfunding platform for sourcing and funding early stage ventures with a network of over 145,000 entrepreneurs and investors. Crowdfunder provides the opportunity for direct online investment into single ventures, while also itself investing into VC-backed startups from its own VC Index Fund. Companies listing on Crowdfunder are typically early-stage startups, many of which are backed by leading Venture Capital firms and private investors. Get free access to private early-stage VC-backed startups on Crowdfunder.

SOURCE: Crowdfunder

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