UPDATED 08:55 EDT / DECEMBER 03 2014

NEWS

Suspect investment? Indiegogo has insurance for that

insuranceIndiegogo Inc. is giving fans of crowd-funding some insurance…literally, by offering insurance for investors if their funded product of choice goes bust.

According to reports, Indiegogo is testing an “Optional Insurance” fee that provides a refund if backers do not eventually receive the product they’ve funded within three months of the promised delivery date.

Proving that truth is often stranger than fiction, Indiegogo is testing the insurance offering with the bizarre, annoying pseudo-scientific armband concept Olive, which we covered here on SiliconANGLE December 1st.

Insurance for the trial costs $15, promising that you’ll have your money returned when Olive if companies don’t follow through with their promises.

“Indiegogo regularly develops and tests new features to meet the needs of both funders and campaign owners. This pilot test is currently limited to this individual campaign,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch.

The proposition of providing an insurance product for crowd funding is a clever one: the crowd funding market is competitive, with Indiegogo competing with the likes of Kickstarter for eyeballs. Offering the option of insurance on investments may not be a sector winning advantage, but it will help the company in defining itself from the rest of the pack.

That said, the move to offer insurance does nothing to address honest concerns that crowd-funding sites do little to nothing to vet campaigns before allowing them to be listed.

 


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