Another Crowdfunding Player Enters The Fray: Apps Genius Launches GetFunded.com

This may not have been the U.S. government’s exact intention when when it passed the crowdfunding-friendly JOBS Act, but you have to wonder if it has also jumpstarted the number of crowdfunding sites out there competing for entrepreneurs’ and consumers’ attention. The latest comes from the social and mobile games developer Apps Genius — (in)famous for its scatological riff on Angry Birds, “Angry Turds” — which today announced that it is launching a new crowd-sourced funding site, GetFunded.

Like Kickstarter and many others, GetFunded will be a “crowdfunding platform for entrepreneurs who are seeking new investments in their businesses and ideas,” according to a statement from App Genius. Adam Kotkin, the CEO of Apps Genius, clarifies that just because his company is focused on games, this doesn’t mean that GetFunded will be, too: it’s aiming for everyone and everything. He tells me the site will be launched in the coming weeks.

This will be something of a change of course for Apps Genius. The company has been around for about two years, focusing on social and mobile games for Facebook as well as iOS and Android platforms. In addition to Angry Turds, it’s also developed a series of celebrity games — it signs exclusive deals with people like Snooki to develop these. Kotkin says another three games are coming out in the “near future.”

So why the side-step to crowdfunding? “I thought this was timely given the JOBS act,” says Kotkin. He also points out that the company’s experience in social gaming and helping them to “spread pretty quickly” will aid it in its crowdfunding effort — which is “also a social process.”

The e-commerce platform for GetFunded is being built specifically for the site and hadn’t been used for App Genius’ games before — which are distributed both as paid apps as well as free games that use ads and in-app purchases to drive revenue.

Kickstarter, probably the most popular crowdfunding site at the moment, is going from strength to strength. The company is estimated to have raised $119 million in funding and made commissions of $6 million on that. It is being used to fund everything from the development of watches to film projects.