Petridish.org, a crowd-funding website restricted specifically to accredited scientific research projects, is getting close to its first $100,000 in funds raised just a month after launching, according to founder Matt Salzberg.
“We have had two projects successfully reach the end of their funding cycles and both earned about $10,000 each,” Salzberg told TPM in a telephone interview, referring to a project to discover a new species of ants in Madagascar ($10,208) and a project to locate the first exomoon, or the first moon outside the solar system ($12,247).
“There’s about 20 projects on the website, and I expect that pretty soon we’ll hit $100,000,” Salzberg told TPM.
That money, poured into projects by the faceless masses of donors on the Web, isn’t anything like the $1 million plus a few individual projects have raised recently on the most popular general crowdfunding website, Kickstarter.
But Petridish’s achievement is nonetheless staggering, given that the website only launched in March and limits projects to no more than $25,000 in funding goals, compared to Kickstarter, which has been around for four years and has no upward limit on project funding.
