Reg CF vs. Reg A+: The 2025 Scorecard Behind $924.8 Million in Crowdfunding

TL;DR: Investment crowdfunding raised $924.8 million in 2025, up 58% from 2024, according to Kingscrowd's 2025 Investment Crowdfunding Annual Report. Reg A+ did most of the heavy lifting, jumping 124% to $546.6 million on the back of mega-raises like Newsmax and Boxabl. Reg CF, the smaller-dollar retail lane most of you actually use, grew a steadier 11% to $378.3 million, even though the number of new Reg CF offerings fell 29%. Fewer deals happened, but the checks per deal got bigger. I dig into what that split means for your odds of finding a decent one below.

The 2025 numbers

Let's start with what actually happened, because the headline number hides two very different stories underneath it. Regulation Crowdfunding (Reg CF) lets private companies raise up to $5 million a year from the general public, accredited or not, through SEC-registered platforms, a structure created under the JOBS Act and detailed in the SEC's crowdfunding exemption rule, 17 CFR 227.100. Regulation A+ (Reg A+) is the bigger sibling. Companies can raise up to $75 million a year under it, and it draws a mix of retail and larger check-writers, sometimes including institutions buying alongside the crowd.

In 2025, both regimes grew, but not at the same speed. Reg A+ posted its best year since the 2021 peak, according to Kingscrowd's mid-year tracking, helped by eight raises that each closed above $40 million, including Newsmax's $75 million raise on the Digital Offering platform and Boxabl's campaign. Reg CF, by contrast, delivered a quieter 11% gain, and it did that with 29% fewer new offerings launching over the course of the year: 1,006 in 2025, down from roughly 1,420 the year before.

2025 U.S. investment crowdfunding, by regulation type

Metric	Reg CF	Reg A+	Combined
Total raised, 2025	$378.3M	$546.6M	$924.8M
YoY change	+11%	+124%	+58%
New offerings launched	1,006 (-29% YoY)	41 (+2 YoY)	1,047
Average successful raise size	$572K (equity deals)	$20.5M	n/a
Median successful raise size	$194K (equity deals)	$8.4M	n/a
Per-issuer annual cap	$5M	$75M	n/a

Source: Kingscrowd, 2025 Investment Crowdfunding Annual Report (published January 2026).

The platform picture matters just as much as the regulatory split, because where a deal lists shapes who sees it and how it's marketed. On the Reg CF side, Kingscrowd's platform breakdown for a sample tracking period showed StartEngine and DealMaker Securities leading by dollars raised per company, with average check sizes north of $2,400. Wefunder ran the widest net: more issuers, smaller average checks around $1,278, spreading capital across the largest number of individual companies. Republic showed up further down the list by dollars in that same window, still active but not leading on volume.

Reg CF platform leaderboard (representative sample, Kingscrowd tracking)

Platform	Companies funded	Avg. check size	Positioning
StartEngine	57	$2,424	Higher dollars per company
DealMaker Securities	58	$2,460	Higher dollars per company
Wefunder	217	$1,278	Widest breadth, most issuers
Republic	n/a in sample	n/a in sample	Active, lower relative volume in sample

Source: Kingscrowd Startup Inbox newsletter, "2025 Annual Report: $924.8M Raised, Fewer Deals, Stronger Rounds," January 2026. Figures reflect a tracked committed-capital sample, not full-year platform totals.

On the Reg A+ side, DealMaker Securities dominated by dollars. Kingscrowd's year-end newsletter puts its 2025 Reg A+ volume at roughly $292 million, more than half of everything raised under the regulation that year. That single-platform concentration is worth sitting with for a second: when one intermediary handles over 50% of an entire regulatory category's dollar volume, the "marketplace" you're picturing is really one distribution channel with a few smaller ones around it.

The real story: fewer deals, bigger bets

Here's the part I want you to actually think about, not just skim. Reg CF dollars rose 11%. Reg CF offering count fell 29%. Do that math and you get a market where the average new campaign is meaningfully larger than it was in 2024. Kingscrowd's own data backs this up directly: 101 Reg CF raises in 2025 pulled in $1 million or more, and nine raises came within $50,000 of hitting the $5 million statutory cap entirely.

I've watched this pattern before in other private markets, and it usually means one of two things is happening, sometimes both at once. Either the market is getting pickier about which founders get funded at all, so only better-prepared or better-connected issuers bother launching a campaign, or the successful issuers who do launch are increasingly able to pre-fill their round with an existing customer base, an influencer following, or investors who backed them in a prior raise before the public campaign even opens. Reg CF has run for close to a decade now. Since 2016, U.S. companies have raised roughly $1.3 billion across about 3,900 offerings, per figures cited in TechBullion's guide to how equity crowdfunding works, and that maturity is starting to show. The easy, small, first-time-founder campaign that defined the category's early years is a smaller share of the pie than it used to be.

What does that mean for you as a small check-writer trying to find a good deal? It cuts two ways, and I don't think it's honest to pretend otherwise. The optimistic read: fewer, bigger, better-vetted campaigns should statistically raise the odds that any given live deal is more investable, because platforms and issuers have more skin in the game and more evidence of demand before you ever see the listing. The pessimistic read: consolidation toward larger, more institutional-adjacent issuers on Reg CF mirrors exactly what's happening on Reg A+ with Newsmax-scale and Boxabl-scale raises. Capital and attention are drifting toward companies that arguably didn't need the crowd as much as the crowd needs interesting things to fund. If you built your investing habit around finding the scrappy $200,000 pre-seed campaign nobody else had noticed yet, that opportunity set shrank by close to a third in a single year.

Zoom out and this looks less like Reg CF gatekeeping retail investors out and more like a barbell forming across the whole crowdfunding market. On one end, Reg A+ is pulling in issuers with real revenue, brand recognition, or media reach, chasing valuations that averaged $702 million in 2025. On the other end, Reg CF is still mostly a small-company, small-check market: the $194,000 median successful raise and the roughly 285-investor average deal size haven't changed all that much in character even as the headline dollar figures moved. What shrank isn't the retail opportunity itself so much as the middle tier of campaigns, the ones too small or too undifferentiated to clear a higher bar for launching at all. Fewer founders are testing the waters with a token raise; more are showing up only once they have traction worth showing.

What this means for you as an investor

Set your expectations using the actual outcome data, not the pitch decks. Of 1,189 Reg CF closings Kingscrowd tracked through the year, 801, or 67.4%, hit their funding target. That is not a coin flip in your favor. Roughly one in three campaigns that launches does not reach its goal at all, which usually means investors get their money back but the company doesn't get funded and you've tied up capital and attention for nothing.

Among the ones that succeeded, the average equity raise brought in $572,000, but the median was only $194,000. That gap tells you a handful of large raises, the $1 million-plus deals and the nine hugging the $5 million ceiling, are pulling the average well above what a typical successful campaign actually raises. On the investor side, a typical Reg CF deal drew around 285 backers at an average check near $1,716, though broader platform samples this year put average checks anywhere from roughly $1,300 to $2,500 depending on the platform. That's the real texture of this market: small checks, wide crowds, modest typical outcomes, with a thin layer of outsized raises at the top skewing every average you'll read in a press release.

Practically, that means three things for how you should actually behave. First, don't anchor on the average $572K figure when sizing up a live campaign. Check where it sits against the $194K median and ask why it's above or below that line. Second, treat the 67.4% success rate as your base-rate discipline. If a campaign is stalling well below its target with days left, the base rate says it's more likely to fail than to pull off a late surge. Third, remember that Reg A+'s average successful raise this year ran near $20.5 million with a median around $8.4 million, an entirely different animal from Reg CF. It's funded overwhelmingly through platforms like DealMaker and StartEngine and, per SEC rules, open to non-accredited investors, but at check sizes and company valuations (Kingscrowd pegs the average Reg A+ valuation near $702 million) that behave more like a late-stage private placement than a garage-startup bet.

The honest caveat

None of this data tells you whether any individual company is a good investment. It tells you about the shape of the market these companies are raising in, and that's a different question. Regulation Crowdfunding and Reg A+ exist because these are early-stage, illiquid, high-failure-rate securities that don't qualify for a normal IPO or a Reg D private placement restricted to accredited investors. The SEC caps how much a non-accredited investor can put in during any 12-month period specifically because it treats this asset class as high risk. Per the SEC's investor bulletin on Regulation Crowdfunding, if your income and net worth are both under $124,000, current rules cap you at the greater of $2,500 or 5% of the larger of your income or net worth in any 12-month period, and that limit applies across all Reg CF deals combined, not per deal.

Consolidation toward fewer, larger raises is not the same thing as consolidation toward safer raises. A $4.9 million Reg CF campaign for a robotics company and a $75 million Reg A+ raise for a media company are both still equity stakes in unprofitable or early-revenue businesses with a real chance of going to zero. A bigger round size buys you more disclosure and audited financials at the higher tiers under SEC Regulation Crowdfunding rules, not a guarantee of a return. Securities bought this way also can't be resold for at least a year in most cases, so you should treat every check here as money you can't touch regardless of what the company does next. And remember that Kingscrowd is a research and ratings firm covering this market, not an independent auditor of any single company's financials; its numbers describe market-wide trends, and you still have to read each individual offering statement yourself.

The takeaway

The 2025 scorecard is genuinely a good-news year for the category. $924.8 million raised, up 58%, is the strongest showing since the 2021 peak. But if you're a retail investor writing $1,000 to $2,000 checks on Reg CF platforms, the more useful number isn't the total. It's the 29% drop in new offerings paired with the 67.4% success rate and the $194,000 median raise. That tells you the deal flow is thinner than it was a year ago, the bar to launch has risen, and your job got a little harder, not easier. Read the actual use-of-funds section and the financials tier before you commit, size your checks against the SEC's investor limits rather than against what a campaign page urges you to add, and don't mistake a platform's biggest raise of the year for the typical outcome you should expect from your own portfolio of smaller bets.

Author Disclosure: Jeff Barnes, MBA has no personal position in any company, fund, or platform named in this article. Angel Investors Network has no current commercial relationship with any party mentioned. AIN provides marketing and education services, not investment advice. Past performance does not guarantee future results. All investments involve risk, including loss of principal.