Crowdfunding for SMEs

This chapter illustrates the emergence of crowdfunding as a means to finance businesses and discusses its potential for financing SME investments. The chapter comments on the origin of crowdfunding and describes its different forms. It illustrates the profile of investments and business models that are suited for crowdfunding, it discusses the key factors that enable the development of crowdfunding activities, it describes recent trends in the crowdfunding industry, and it presents recent regulatory reforms and policies that are intended to ease the development of this financing channel, for both debt and equity funding.