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What we do

Innovators and creatives are often faced with the same challenges: promoting their ideas, attracting supporters, and raising the necessary funds. We founded Startnext in 2010 as Germany’s first crowdfunding platform to help support these innovators. Startnext gives entrepreneurs, inventors and creative people the opportunity to present their ideas and projects, raise funds with the support of several people, and build a community.

Startnext is now the largest crowdfunding community for creative and sustainable projects and startups in the German-speaking countries. With our team we work every day to bring new ideas to life and continue developing Startnext with the help of our rapidly growing community.

    Our goal is to facilitate the better part of seed funding for creatives, inventors, social entrepreneurs und makers via Startnext. We want to increase the visibility for the ideas, to create more independence for the starters and more financial security thanks to the early market test.

    Denis Bartelt, CEO and founder of Startnext

    What we believe in

    • Creativity: We believe that social progress emanates from creativity and innovation, and we actively motivate starters to realize their ideas.
    • Sustainability: We strive to shape social change, and to that end we are committed to sustainable ideas, social enterprises, and social innovation.
    • Crowd-powered: Together, we can move mountains! Startnext is a social network, a laboratory, an incubator, and a search engine for exciting new ideas all in one.
    • Transparency and openness: With Startnext, anyone is free to start a project, and anyone can participate.
    Crowdfunding to me is the logical next step after social media. Thanks to the ever growing digital networking, we can not only share but also fund ideas quickly and cheaply with a lot of people. This is a democratization of capital distribution.

    Tino Kreßner, founder of Startnext

    How crowdfunding works

    The idea behind crowdfunding is simple: Several people come together to finance an idea, project, or company. Starters introduce their ideas through short videos, images, and text; set a funding goal and timeline for the campaign; and decide on rewards for their projects’ supporters. Anyone who wants to see an idea become a reality can support a project. Supporters can choose from a number of rewards, such as the finished product or support the project with a free amount. 

    Startnext is also financed according to the crowdfunding principle, through voluntary supports. The starters themselves decide with what percentage of the collected funding sum they want to support Startnext. Also the supporters have the possibility to support the mission of Startnext with a free amount.