Juked commences second crowdfunding round

Juked, a social media app aimed at esports fans, has announced the start of a crowdfunding campaign on the Wefunder platform.

The campaign will allow anyone to invest in the company, provided they have more than $100 (£84) to spend.

This is the second time the social media app is looking to the community to fuel its growth. The first crowdfunding round, which finished in 2021 on Republic, was a successful one. Juked raised just a bit over $1m (£840,000) and used the money to scale its team and improve the app.

Speaking to Esports Insider during the first crowdfunding round, Juked CEO Ben Goldhaber said that the proceeds from the first round were to be used to hire more people in the engineering and content teams.

The same basic growth principle applies to this round. The company noted that this time the funds will be used to ‘continue Juked’s growth strategy’, and further improve the Juked mobile app. The team also plans to rebuild the original Juked.gg website and include user-generated content, profiles and other features.

Juked made headlines following its founding in 2019 for being a completely new app for esports fans, but with a heavy focus on non-toxic and abusive behaviour. Last year, Juked also partnered with Queer Women of Esports to help fight toxicity. The app was officially launched in early 2022, and now has around 15,000 registered users. Juked has recently started a verification process for notable industry insiders, similar to Twitter and Facebook checkmarks. According to Juked, around 500 people from the esports industry are verified on the app.

Chris Chan, Juked’s COO and Head of Product, commented: “Building more products and technology to nurture and foster the growth of this community is a personal passion of mine and what I ultimately believe will break esports and even gaming through any perceived ceilings.”

Juked’s crowdfunding round official began today on the Wefunder platform.