Kickstarter's Busy Q1 Includes $112 Million in Total Donations

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A man wears Oculus Rift, a Kickstarter backed project created by Oculus VR that recently sold to Facebook for $2 billion.

Image: Flickr, Global Panorama

By Kurt Wagner2014-04-02 20:39:14 UTC

Kickstarter has had a busy start to 2014 — and donation figures are only part of the story.

The crowdfunding platform released its first-ever quarterly report on Wednesday, revealing $112 million in total pledges and 680,000 new backers in the first three months of this year. Nearly 4,500 projects were successfully funded, and donors pledged more than $1.25 million per day to Kickstarter campaigns, slightly less than the $1.32 million pledged on average last year.

See also: Kickstarter Backlash: Early Oculus Supporters Hate Facebook Deal

Those numbers put the company slightly behind the pace needed to reach last year's $480 million in total pledges, which was a record-setting year for the crowdfunding platform.

Image: Kurt Wagner/Mashable

However, numbers are only part of the story for Kickstarter, which has witnessed happy endings to some of its most high-profile campaigns in early 2014.

Facebook acquired Oculus VR, a project funded through Kickstarter, for $2 billion in March, making it one of the social network's largest acquisitions to date. Also in March, The Square was nominated for an Oscar in the Best Documentary Feature category, making it the seventh Oscar nomination for a Kickstarter-backed project. Four separate Kickstarter projects were also nominated for Grammys in January.

On March 14, Veronica Mars hit theaters after raising more than $5.7 million on Kickstarter last April.

The quarterly update is rare for Kickstarter, a company known for being relatively tight-lipped about its total funding and donor figures. A company spokesperson told Mashable that people enjoy the transparency and stats included in the annual reports, and this feedback encouraged the company to release data more frequently.

Kickstarter also added 15 employees in Q1, the company's "biggest period of team growth to date," according to the report.

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Topics: crowdfunding, donors, kickstarter, Q1, Startups, Tech, the sqaure