Crowdfunding – a funding model that leverages online platforms to raise capital from a large pool of individuals – is currently valued at around $1.41 billion globally. As of May 2023, Kickstarter, a leading crowdfunding platform, had launched more than 592,000 projects (Statista, 2023) The emergence and growth of crowdfunding offers the potential to transform the structure and mechanisms by which small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) can raise capital. This is particularly valuable since the credit crunch that followed the