In last week’s emerging crowdsourcing and crowdfunding platforms roundup, we wrote about GoFundMe, UFunded, and a pair of newly launched open innovation initiatives. This week, we highlight a few more platforms and projects that made recent headlines.

Boost Funder

Boost Funder is a crowdfunding platform created by Adam Draper with the help of Invested.in. The platform is a matchmaking service for potential investors and aspiring startups. Boost Funder emphasizes selectiveness: startups have to apply for a spot on the site, and at least until the SEC finalizes JOBS Act regulation, all investors must be accredited. This means that unlike other crowdfunded platforms, Boost Funder is able to operate today, getting a head start on its competition.

Scolaris

Hoping to prove that crowdfunding can be applied to education, Mark Mauleesan launched the beta version of Scolaris, a Canadian platform that crowdsources college tuition funds. While the portal may enable thousands of deserving students to attend the schools of their dreams, Mauleesan and his team must take steps to ensure that fraud does not become a problem on the platform. It’s important to note that in Canada, higher education is much more affordable than in the U.S. – around $5,500 per year.

Seedrs

The U.K. had big crowdfunding news in the last two weeks. Kickstarter announced its U.K. autumn launch, and Seedrs, an equity-based crowdfunding platform, opened its doors to investors and entrepreneurs. As the name suggests, Seedrs positions itself as a way for startups to raise early-stage funding. Individuals will be able to invest from £10 to £150,000 into a business, of which Seedrs will take 7.5%. The platform hopes to expand into other European countries over the next six to nine months.

BlackGirlsCode

BlackGirlsCode (BGC), a San Francisco-based non-profit organization that aims to teach programming to a new generation of coders, recently completed a $21,000 crowdfunding campaign on IndieGoGo. The money raised will go toward funding BGC’s ‘Summer of Code,’ a project launched in June to introduce computer skills to boys and girls in Chicago, Atlanta, St. Louis, Los Angeles, Oakland, and San Francisco. While the campaign is open to all, it is especially focused on girls from African American, Latino, and Native American communities, who are underrepresented in fields related to computer science.

ALS Prediction Prize

Innocentive, an open innovation company, teamed up with Prize4Life to launch the DREAM-Phil Bowen Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) Prediction Prize4Life Challenge. ALS, more commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, is a neurodegenerative illness that affects approximately one out of every 50,000 people. The challenge aims to find a way to better predict the progression of the disease in a patient, which directly affects an individual’s treatment course. The entrants will have access to the PRO-ACT database of 7,500 ALS patients who completed clinical trials in order to better understand the way the illness functions.