Our Real-life IP series, in which we interview clever NZ businesses and find out how they manage intellectual property (IP) in their business starts again today. If you have recommendations for who we should interview, please email us.
PledgeMe is New Zealand’s crowdfunding platform. They help Kiwis turn their dreams into reality through crowdfunding. PledgeMe runs two platforms, PledgeMe Projects, their original crowdfunding website aimed at creative projects and PledgeMe Equity for investment into companies.
We talked with founder and Chief Bubble Blower of PledgeMe, Anna Guenther.
Tell us a bit about PledgeMe…
PledgeMe is a crowdfunding platform focusing on New Zealand campaigns. We started two years ago. We’ve had over 700 successful campaigns so far raising almost $3,000,000.
[PledgeMe also successfully raised $100,000 in November through their own equity crowdfunding platform in less than 24 hours.]

How big is your business? Do you have lots of employees?
We’ve got three staff and a group of contractors and consultants on our board as well. We are looking to grow now that we’ve got equity crowdfunding and an equity crowdfunding license into that space, but it’s early days.
How did you start? Did you have investment?
I was working for the government for a few years and realized in order to progress [in my career], I probably had to go back and study or go and work for a private company for a little while. So I decided to go back and study, and I started the company while still working for the government.
PledgeMe actually came out of my Masters thesis. I wrote about crowdfunding and did all that business-y stuff around it, and [then] I co-founded PledgeMe with a developer who was building an engine.
We didn’t have any investment to start with. We bootstrapped it pretty hard for the first year and a half. It’s only the last year that we’ve gotten investment.