Support your favorite anime artists: Crowdfunding site Anipipo finally launches

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Tokyo- and Bangkok-based startup Goopa has launched its anime-focused crowdfunding site Anipipo today. The new site provides ways for anime project owners to find funding to support their productions. Supporters will receive a premium reward from project owners in return for their financial support. The site is not only geared towards motion picture projects, but it’s also open to application for music, games, books, event projects, and more.

As of today, the following three projects are available and open to receive funding from supporters.

  1. Santa Company – A motion picture project by Itoso from Kenji Studio
  2. ABC of Akari – A motion picture project by Vincente from AnigoAnimtion
  3. Ponpon Pipopo – A picture book publication project by Moo

The startup was launched by Japanese entrepreneur Hiroaki Taira. Some of our readers may recall that he helped us to organize our meet-up events up until last year. In addition to Taira, the board members include two young Thai entrepreneurs Vincent Sethiwan and Permsiri Tiyavutiroj, who are known for running the LaunchPad incubation space in Bangkok. The startup primarily conducts business development in Tokyo, and system development in Bangkok.

Anipipo was originally planned to launch back in February, but had to adjust the schedule a little bit. Everything was prepared for launch at that time, but they ran into difficulties getting approval from PayPal to become a merchant, an essential step in order to provide users with adequate payment methods. According to Taira, this is because PayPal has raised the bar for merchant accounts for crowdsourcing platforms. He actually visited PayPal headquarters in San Jose, and persuaded them on this issue. There appears to be a number of dubious crowdfunding sites around the world right now, so this is probably why Paypal is being careful. But the deployment of such strict regulations on their part indicates that the market has become too big to be ignored.

You may remember that Gyao and GREE jointly formed an anime-focused investment fund back in February, another significant development that should help the anime businesses. There is also illustration crowdsourcing service MugenUp and voice crowdsourcing service Voip.

Anipipo previously fundraised 4.5 million yen (approximately $45,000) from Tokyo startup incubator Samurai Incubate. With the service’s official launch, we should expect to see another round of funding pretty soon.