Lots of Kickstarter projects are "proof of interest" ventures. If you make your target, it triggers additional funding you've pre-negotiated..

I don't see how it's a problem in general (not talking about this particular KS here) since it's a useful tool for showing investors that enough people are willing to pay for your product.

Doppler Labs' recent KS for "Here Active Listening" closed successfully last week with $635k in funding, and they just announced a $17M series B funding round this week.

I'd have to assume these two events are related, and as a backer of the KS campaign, I'm actually happy to see this, since it means the product probably won't be a one-off, and they will continue to update the software post-release, etc..

Sort of, but that's what is happening now. My friends did a successful Kickstarter campaign of a hardware product and I know first-hand that the idea came from their investors and it was done purely for market research. The Kickstarter event was pretty much break-even effort for my friends. VCs seem to have figured out that crowdfunding is a cheap way of checking if a company is worth further investments, while at the same time giving it some marketing boost.