Online donation platform
Crypto owners tend to be more generous than other investors when donating to charity, research shows. Whether that’s because of their strong sense of community or because of the lucrative tax benefits of doing so is anyone’s guess, but nonetheless, savvy charities have taken note of the trend and sought to leverage it. That’s part of why Change, a startup that develops APIs to help companies and charities process donations, has decided to hone in on the asset class.
Founded in 2020 by Sonia Nigam and Amar Shah, two Northwestern alumni who met during their first college class, Change began as a platform that aimed to streamline the process for any group to build an online giving experience. The startup works with companies seeking to strengthen their brands and communicate their mission through charitable giving campaigns as well as nonprofits themselves, which use Change’s APIs to enable online donations without having to build the tech to do so from scratch.
While raising their pre-seed round, which closed in November 2020, the pair began to notice how the web3 community was “inherently giving in nature,” Shah, who also serves as the company’s president, told TechCrunch in a joint interview with CEO Nigam. The co-founders began widening their aperture from building a simple API for online donations of fiat currency to enabling its customers to accept crypto donations as well.
While Change’s tech for fiat transactions is currently more advanced, it just raised a $5 million seed round to move further into the crypto space, the co-founders said. Freestyle and NEA led the round, which featured participation from Shrug Capital as well as angel investors from Solana, Alchemy and Dapper Labs, which had also contributed to the pre-seed round.
Aside from its co-founders, Change has one other full-time employee today and plans to use the new funding to double its team size to six people by the end of the year, Nigam said.
Change says it currently works to channel funds to more than 200,000 different accredited charities, including Make-A-Wish America and New York-based Welcome to Chinatown, though Nigam and Shah declined to disclose how many clients the startup works with today or the amount of money that has flowed through its APIs.
Online donation platform
