Dive Brief:

• To fund construction of the interior of a 23-story hotel in Manhattan in New York City to be known as 17 John, crowdsourcing guru Rodrigo Niño is offering investors a chance to put up $100,000 each toward constructing the interior of the hotel.
• The hotel, focused on extended-stay guests, looks like a steel-and-glass tower grafted onto a brick medium-rise building from an earlier era.
• The building was designed by Winka Dubbeldam, an architect with Archi-Tectonics NL.

Dive Insight:

Niño formed Prodigy Group, which focuses on bringing projects to completion through crowdsourcing rather than traditional investment. The reason, he said, is that "we have learned that crowdfunding not only democratizes investments, it also makes projects viable that otherwise would not be possible.”