The Global Equity Crowdfunding Alliance (GECA) has reached 100 member organisations, completing The First 100: the founding members of the global regulated crowdfunding conversation. Here is where we came from, what this community has built, and the programme now underway to shape the industry’s next decade.
What is the Global Equity Crowdfunding Alliance?
GECA is the trusted convener for the worldwide regulated crowdfunding community. It is the global room where crowdfunding platforms, regulators, technology providers, industry associations, researchers and academics exchange ideas, share best practice, and advance the industry together through year-round collaboration and coordinated action.
While equity crowdfunding is in our name and at our heart, GECA’s community spans the full breadth of regulated crowdfunding: equity, real estate, peer-to-peer lending, debt, bonds and beyond. Wherever everyday investors fund businesses and projects through regulated online platforms, that is our industry, and it is one industry.
Regulated crowdfunding is how thousands of businesses and projects around the world now raise capital from the communities that believe in them. But for most of its history, the industry has been fragmented: national markets solving identical problems in separate rooms, regulators writing rules without hearing what worked elsewhere, and platforms reinventing what a peer on another continent had already perfected. GECA exists to change that.
Where GECA came from
GECA began as a conversation between a handful of believers who shared one conviction: that regulated crowdfunding is a global industry that behaves like a local one, and that it would move faster the moment it started talking to itself.
There was no grand launch budget and no legacy institution behind it. There was a shared belief, a growing network of practitioners willing to show up for each other, and a simple promise: convene the industry, globally, properly, for the long term.
One hundred organisations later, that promise has a membership.
Who are The First 100?
The First 100 are the founding members of GECA, and they span every corner of the industry and the globe: crowdfunding platforms across equity, real estate, lending and debt that have collectively raised billions, national and regional crowdfunding associations, regulatory and policy voices, the technology providers building the industry’s infrastructure, data and research specialists, law firms, service providers, and academic institutions studying how community capital works.
Market leaders sit alongside emerging platforms. Voices from the United States, the United Kingdom and Europe sit alongside members from Africa, Asia, Australasia and the Americas. Every one of them now holds permanent Founding Member status, numbered #1 through #100, recognised for as long as GECA exists.
What has GECA achieved so far?
In a remarkably short time, this community has built real convening infrastructure for the industry: a Steering Committee bringing together some of the most respected voices in global crowdfunding, global think tanks convening cross-border conversations, an AI Governance Task Force examining how artificial intelligence changes crowdfunding operations, compliance and investor experience, the Global Pulse briefing tracking regulated crowdfunding developments around the world, the GECA Podcast featuring the people shaping the industry, regular industry newsletters, and a growing presence on the world’s stages, from Belgium to Málaga, Los Angeles to Washington DC.
Behind the headlines sits the quieter achievement: week after week of member conversations where a platform in one market learns from an identical problem solved in another, where practitioners compare what actually converts investors, and where the industry’s collective knowledge compounds.
What is GECA launching next?
Reaching 100 members isn’t the finish line. It’s the operating scale GECA was built for, and the programme now underway is the most ambitious in the alliance’s history.
Two new task forces. Following the AI Governance Task Force, GECA is launching a PR and Media Task Force to champion the industry’s story to the wider world, and an Institutional Funding Opportunities Task Force to explore how institutional capital can participate in regulated crowdfunding at scale, one of the industry’s biggest unlock opportunities.
More of what members value most. Regular and timely podcast episodes, the industry bulletin tracking developments worldwide, and GECA Happenings keeping the community connected to everything the alliance is doing.
And one flagship programme to set the industry’s agenda:
The Future of Crowdfunding Initiative 2026-2027
GECA is convening the global industry around one question: what will crowdfunding look like in five years? The initiative runs in four stages, culminating in a definitive global report.
Stage 1: Conversations on the Future of Crowdfunding (from August 2026). A roundtable series convening leading voices across three big questions:
- What industries are best suited for equity crowdfunding? Sector performance data, the fastest-growing markets, and what different jurisdictions can learn from each other.
- What makes a successful crowdfunding ecosystem? Comparing markets, regulation, platform models, cross-border investment and secondary markets around the world.
- How do we unlock the next decade of crowdfunding? AI, institutional investment, retail participation, platform collaboration, and what would create 10x growth.
Stage 2: The Global Industry Survey (September-October 2026). A Delphi-style research exercise, GECA’s largest primary research to date, drawing on its 100+ members and supporters worldwide. Experts complete an anonymous survey, findings are aggregated and shared back, participants refine their views, and areas of consensus and divergence across regulation, technology, investor behaviour, consolidation, cross-border activity and institutional participation are identified. Participants will be featured and positioned in the final report.
Stage 3: The Findings Webinar (late 2026). A global webinar presenting the results, exploring where the industry agrees, where it diverges, and what it means for the decade ahead. GECA also expects to present emerging findings at in-person industry events in the USA and Germany in October and November 2026.
Stage 4: The Future of Crowdfunding Report (Q1 2027). A flagship global thought leadership report combining the Delphi findings, regional perspectives and expert commentary: the definitive picture of where regulated crowdfunding is heading, built by the industry itself.
No single market can see the whole picture of this industry. One hundred member organisations across every continent and every crowdfunding vertical can. That is precisely what a global convener is for.
Why does 100 members matter?
Because convening only works at scale. A conversation between five platforms is a call. A conversation between 100 organisations spanning platforms, regulators, technologists and researchers on every continent is an industry talking to itself, and an industry that talks to itself gets better, faster, everywhere at once.
It matters for founders and project owners, because a coordinated industry means more capital moving across borders to the businesses that deserve it. It matters for investors, because shared standards and shared learning mean better protection and better opportunities. And it matters for regulators, because they now have one global community to engage rather than a hundred fragmented voices.
Join the next 100
Founding status is closed, but the conversation is wide open. The next 100 members join at the most exciting moment in GECA’s history: a seat at the roundtables, a voice in the Global Industry Survey, and a place in the research that will define the Future of Crowdfunding Report. If your organisation builds, regulates, powers, studies or serves regulated crowdfunding anywhere in the world, the room is open.
Join GECA: https://thegeca.org/join
The Global Equity Crowdfunding Alliance is the trusted convener for the worldwide regulated crowdfunding community. Learn more at https://thegeca.org, listen to the GECA Podcast at https://thegeca.org/podcast/, and follow GECA on LinkedIn and X.
