Introducing GroupFund, a New Helping Hand for Developers From GroupGets

GroupGets was founded in 2013 to hack minimum order quantities on pre-distribution, electronic components. Like Voltron, DIYers, researchers and thrifty techies have joined together to save thousands of dollars on consumer-grade electronics.

The platform eventually evolved to empower independent hardware developers to raise funds to produce their own electronic designs such as AudioMoth, a bioacoustic logger for wildlife monitoring. So far, over 1,000 public and private campaigns have been created raising over $50M. A few of these campaigns such as an open source SoC evaluation board: LoFive, and an accessible, thermal imaging board: tCam-Mini have made their way to a tier-one distributor, and an FPGA favorite, OrangeCrab, is being distributed on Farnell. These campaigns, along with many others, have also stocked the GroupGets store to continue partnerships and keep cool tech in the market.

Michael Welling, founder of Qwerty Embedded Design, has funded several projects through the platform:

“GroupGets has been my trusted crowdfunding partner since 2017. Since then I have launched several campaigns and they have always been transparent and knowledgeable. They are perfect for makers that want to validate that their product has a market without more fanfare than is needed. The campaign setup and launch is simple and successful launches can even lead to your product listing with major vendors."

GroupFund was recently created as a new feature to enable developers and conservation technologists to fund innovative projects without the need to ship a product to backers. It’s like a GoFundMe for technological expeditions, but the value delivered has impact beyond the immediate team making the campaign.

The process of creating a campaign is the same for both GroupGet and GroupFund; the key difference is the goal of the creator. Members seeking to: market test a working, custom PCB design; group buy gadgets with minimum order quantities; and distribute a device to sell and list in the GroupGets store would build a GroupGet campaign. Members that are seeking to fund research; adding software/firmware/hardware features to open source projects; and R&D’ing their own design despite the chip shortage, would build a GroupFund campaign. Both campaign types are able to create and launch for free, with platform and processing charges only applicable if the campaign is successful. (GroupFunders have the added bonus: whether or not the campaign is successful in meeting its milestone, they can keep the funding that was raised overall!)

Our Hackster community aims to recruit and hype technologists that push the edge of electronics and conservation efforts as either a GroupGet or GroupFund campaign creator.