Citizinvestor

The bet

Kickstarter's model is simple: back a specific project, then watch it happen. Citizinvestor bet the same model could work for public infrastructure, provided a city government signed off on the project first. Jordan Raynor, Tony DeSisto, Erik Rapprich and Joy Randels founded it in Tampa and launched it in 2012.

Residents could crowdfund things like a new dog park or a repaired playground, and the city agreed in advance to actually build whatever got funded. That closed the loop ordinary crowdfunding leaves open.

Peak

Citizinvestor got traction and attention as an early, credible example of "civic crowdfunding," a term academics and foundations were actively trying to define in the same years. It ran successful campaigns across multiple cities.

In 2014 it launched Citizinvestor Connect, a white-label version of the platform sold directly to municipalities so they could run their own pipeline of citizen-funded projects. The team was reaching for a more durable, B2B version of the idea.

What worked

Requiring municipal buy-in before a project could be listed was the right design decision. A resident's pledge was never wasted on something the city would refuse to build, which is the failure that makes ordinary crowdfunding a poor fit for public projects. The model also proved that people would fund small, tangible local improvements when they could see the finish line clearly.

What failed — the mechanism

Every campaign needed two sides to show up first: a government office willing to commit to and pre-approve a project, and enough residents willing to fund it. Coordinating both, city by city, is slow, relationship-heavy work. It doesn't compress the way software growth usually does.

Citizinvestor Connect was meant to fix this by selling the pipeline itself to a city, so the team no longer had to run one campaign at a time. By the founders' own account it came too late, and it needed more capital than they had to reach the scale the business required. DeSisto later said plainly that Citizinvestor "didn't scale the way we wanted and couldn't sustain itself," and that the founders had moved on to other projects by the time the company closed in June 2018.

What Agora takes from it

Citizinvestor's central insight was that a citizen channel to government needs the government side committed up front, or the whole exercise is theater. Agora shares that view completely. It's the reason Agora's wedge is verified officials as the only ones who post.

What Citizinvestor couldn't solve was reaching enough governments, fast enough, to build a self-sustaining two-sided market on venture timelines. Agora's answer to that cold start is to aggregate officials' existing public records automatically. The supply side doesn't have to be recruited and onboarded office by office before the platform has something real to show.