Crowdfunding For Women-MoolaHoop Grows

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By Hanah Cho
The Dallas Morning News

MoolaHoop, a reward-based crowd-funding platform for female entrepreneurs, said Tuesday that it has acquired small business crowd-funding site Lucky Ant.

Financial terms were not announced.

The acquisition allows Dallas-based MoolaHoop to integrate New York-based Lucky Ant’s technology into its own platform.

MoolaHoop co-founder Brenda Bazan said Lucky Ant’s technology enhances MoolaHoop’s platform by making it easier for female entrepreneurs to build and manage their crowd-funding campaigns.

For instance, entrepreneurs can choose from templates specific to their business or industry to create a campaign.

The new MoolaHoop platform also automatically connects campaigns to social media such as Facebook and Twitter.

“People are running a business.

They need to be 100 percent focused on business and not focused on building and running their crowd-funding campaigns,” Bazan said.

Bazan and co-founder Nancy Hayes launched MoolaHoop in July to address the funding disparity for female entrepreneurs.

Since then, MoolaHoop has launched 11 campaigns. Nine entrepreneurs have raised more than $100,000, Bazan said.

One is Frisco entrepreneur Crystal Gornto, who launched a $10,000 campaign for HeartStories, an online and mobile community to empower women.

Using MoolaHoop, Gornto exceeded her goal, raising a little more than $26,000.

In February, Gornto is launching a HeartStories app.

Bazan said she hopes the enhanced MoolaHoop platform will help increase the number of female entrepreneurs raising capital.

“We’ve learned how to help people raise a lot of money,” she said. “Now we want to help a lot of people raise money.”

Featured in photo: Crystal Gornto, an entrepreneur, has secured $10,000 for her startup, HeartStories, using the Dallas, Texas-based crowdfunding site MoolaHoop.(David Woo/Dallas Morning News/MCT)