I actually freelanced on a project 10 years ago which was exactly that. Don’t take its failure as proof that such an idea cannot succeed, but the major headwinds were that most research is pretty difficult to explain (and scientists are not selected for their ability to communicate with Lee people).

Also remember that Kickstarter found it necessary to write a blog post “Kickstarter is not a store“, because people were expecting projects to return fast, reliable, tangible results. By its nature, science will be even further from that revealed preference of funders