Thundafund set to launch community crowdfunding platform come January

South African crowdfunding site Thundafund is set to launch a community crowdfunding platform within the next month, confirming what Ventureburn sources have been saying for some time now.

The company, which has hosted some of South Africa’s most successful crowdfunding campaigns, is reportedly looking to spin off the part of the site responsible for funding things like albums, pieces of art and theatrical performances.

The new site, which Disrupt Africa revealed will be called Ripple, is designed to allow Thundafund to exist purely as a platform on which entrepreneurs can raise funding.

Despite only launching in 2013, the split does make a fair amount of sense for Thundafund. For one, the company already has well established links in the South African startup space.

Perhaps the most obvious example of this is the partnership it has with mobile payments system Snapscan, which allows people to make on-the-ground contributions to campaigns.

Up-and-coming online marketplace MzansiStore meanwhile successfully used the platform to provide a local designer with the tools to put her designs in production and ultimately sell them online.

More importantly however, the South African tech investment space is still pretty small and finding a way of opening it up to a wider audience can only be a good thing.

In order to fund its new developments, Thundafund will itself be turning to crowdfunding. According to Disrupt Africa, it’s looking to raise between R3-million (US$260 000) and R5-million (US$430 000) from British crowdfunding site Crowdcube.