Online fundraising platform Onevest is a few days (and a few dollars) short of finishing its latest funding round — on its own platform.

The company’s crowdfunding platform is typically used to fund startups, which Onevest is, or was — it started in 2010.

Crowdfunding, along with P2P or marketplace lending, fills out a growing category in financial services known as “alternative finance.” It grew into a $16.4 billion industry in 2014, according to a June 21 report from DealIndex, which tracks alternative finance. DealIndex counts more than 1,250 crowdfunding platforms worldwide.

“While alternative finance started off as a seed-round endeavor,” DealIndex CEO Neha Manaktala writes in the report, “more recently platforms have begin to emerge at different stages of the funding cycle, disrupting traditional institutions. Drawn by the increased access to investors that operating online affords, platforms now make it possible for companies to raise capital at every stage of the funding cycle online.”

Alternative finance may be large and growing, but it is “still a drop in the ocean compared to the $3.3 trillion addressable market opportunity,” said Manaktala, a veteran of Lehman Brothers and Morgan Stanley. She witnessed the growth of alternative finance from within the traditional financial services world, and realized the need to quantify it. She founded DealIndex in Jan. 2014 to do just that.

“Alternative finance is removing information barriers and information inefficiencies that exist in the private market, opening funding conduits and channeling global liquidity,” Manaktala said. And, echoing a theme heard across the fintech world, she describes alternative finance as a collaborator of financial services as a whole, rather than simply a disruptor.

As investors pay more attention to the space, Manaktala seeks to rationalize it and bring the data around it in line with traditional financial services and products, while respecting the innovation and creativity that energize the market. From the report:

With rapid growth in the alternative finance space comes the need for increased maturity in the industry and systems to contend with the unknown and untested impact of changing credit and interest rate cycles, liquidity squeezes, fluctuating asset pricing and valuations and the impact of the macroeconomic environment. Moreover, with increased funding rounds, shorter capital raising cycles, diversified and changing investor bases in private companies, structured offerings and more sophistication being applied so early on in the life of a company, comes the need for best practices to be applied from financial services. Due diligence, risk and portfolio management, research, liquidity channels / secondary market – these are all vital parts of finance and are now beginning to permeate alternative finance.

With crowdfunding, anyone can be an investor, even you, reader. Do you think crowdfunding platforms will be the next big thing? Put your spare change into Onevest here.