There’s a new platform on the market that’s putting the value power back in creative freelancers’ hands.

Entrepreneur Leah Hill — founder of Kindred Media & Entertainment — has announced the launch of a new app dedicated to connecting creatives with job opportunities and transforming them into investors.

Kinfolk App is a first-of-its-kind platform that’s offering these creatives a unique opportunity to both invest and generate funds. By eliminating the pressure of networking between creatives and project leads, Kinfolk App is creating a two-sided solution to help simplify the marketplace.

“Creating an app like Kinfolk was sparked out of personal necessity. There have been numerous times it seemed impossible to fill a role for a team I was working on. In fact, finding a mobile app developer to work with on Kinfolk proved to be a much harder task than I anticipated,” Hill shared. “Also, whenever I went on social media I was seeing posts searching for creatives with certain skill sets, whether it was 2D animation or voice actors. Disconnect in the creative freelance marketplace was becoming a very apparent issue to me.”

According to demographic study ProjectDiane, only .64% of venture capital dollars have gone toward Black and Latinx women combined between 2018 and 2019. This reality is what helped Hill and the rest of her team better strategize over how they could secure funds for the app.

“Recognizing the odds were not in our favor going traditional funding routes, our team decided to take this opportunity to change the narrative around funding startups,” she said in a press statement.

A press release shared with AfroTech reports that Kinfolk App currently has a minimum funding goal of $50,000 but hopes to raise upwards of $250,000. The minimum goal will go directly toward finalizing the app’s user experience and further developing it for launch. Additional funding through this seed round will also help the company’s team invest more in their branding, marketing and other operations.

For this new platform, each person that invests will receive a SAFE equivalent to their investment amount, which grants them the right to obtain equity at a future date if the startup is to sell any shares in future financing.

For Hill, the conversations discussing how creatives and users generate all the value for today’s apps is what inspired her to create this new form of raising funds.

“This app was designed to serve creatives, so opening a funding round where they could invest made perfect sense,” Hill stated in a press release. “The longer I sat with the idea of executing the raise like this, the more it felt like exactly what the Kinfolk brand stands for. Bringing value to and serving the creative.”

It is her hope now that success from this round will enable the company to replicate this method of crowdfunding on a larger scale in the future.

Creatives can sign up to become seed investors of Kinfolk App by clicking this link.

For more information about Kinfolk App, visit its website and follow the platform on Instagram.

Kinfolk App

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