Kickstarter is a Brooklyn-based crowdfunding platform launched in April 2009 by Perry Chen, Yancey Strickler, and Charles Adler to let creators raise money for projects in exchange for tiered rewards rather than equity or debt. The platform's all-or-nothing funding model — projects only collect pledges if they hit their funding goal — became the template for reward-based crowdfunding, with Kickstarter alone processing well over $7 billion in pledged funds across hundreds of thousands of successfully funded projects since launch.
The idea originated with Chen in 2002 when he tried unsuccessfully to crowdsource a New Orleans concert, and the company eventually shipped after a six-year incubation. In 2015 Kickstarter reincorporated as a Public Benefit Corporation and became a certified B Corp, embedding social mission into its charter — an early and high-profile example of mission-locked structuring in venture-backed tech. Categories span games (its largest), design, technology, film, music, publishing, and food, with film and indie-game communities particularly using the platform as both a fundraising channel and an audience-building launch event.
I've never run a Kickstarter campaign myself, but I've backed enough over the last decade to have helped a number of them blow past their goals.