Online donation platform Change helps charities raise money in crypto – TechCrunch

Crypto-owners tend to be more generous when donating to charity than other investors, research shows. Whether it is because of their strong sense of community or because of the lucrative tax benefits of doing so is someone’s guess, but nonetheless, knowledgeable charities have noticed the trend and tried to take advantage of it. This is part of the reason why Change, a start-up that develops APIs to help companies and charities process donations, has decided to refine 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 aims to streamline the process for any group to build an online giving experience. The startup works with companies that want to strengthen their brands and communicate their mission through charities as well as non-profit organizations themselves, which use Changes APIs to enable online donations without having to build the technology to do so from scratch.

As they raised their pre-seed round, which ended in November 2020, the couple began to notice how the web3 community “inherently gives in nature,” Shah, who also serves as the company’s president, told TechCrunch in a joint interview with CEO Nigam. The co-founders began to expand the opening from building a simple fiat currency online donation API to enabling customers to accept cryptocurrencies as well.

While Chang’s technology for fiat transactions is currently more advanced, it has just raised a $ 5 million seed round to move further into the crypto area, the co-founders said. Freestyle and NEA led the round, which included participation from Shrug Capital as well as angel investors from Solana, Alchemy and Dapper Labs who had also contributed to the pre-seed round.

Sonia Nigam and Amar Shah, co-founders of Donation API Startup Change Photo credit: Change

Apart from the co-founders, Change has another full-time employee today and plans to use the new funding to double the team size to six people by the end of the year, Nigam said.

Change says it is currently channeling funds to more than 200,000 different accredited charities, including Make-A-Wish America and New York-based Welcome to Chinatown, although Nigam and Shah declined to disclose how many customers the startup is working on. today or how much money has flowed through the APIs.

In addition to the crypto community’s affiliation with charitable donations, Nigam and Shah believe that crypto donations will continue to grow because they are publicly verifiable on a large scale through the blockchain, providing a level of transparency that is not always guaranteed to donors. They have also seen an increase in demand from DAOs, decentralized financial apps and other web3 companies that want to develop charitable opportunities.

“We really focus on downsizing and activating all the tracking and management tools we have for the traditional brands, and bringing [them] to the cryptocurrency, Nigam said.

The start-up has already received attention in the crypto world for its partnership with Metaplex, the main protocol for embossing NFTs on the Solana blockchain. Through Change, any NFT creator using Metaplex can leverage their ability to determine how royalties will be awarded each time NFT is sold to allocate a portion of the sales revenue to a specific charity, Nigam said.

Change is partnering with a group of advisors as well as platforms like GuideStar to veterinarian charities for its list by assessing their publicly available disclosures, Nigam explained, noting that the company reduced a list of over 1.5 million nonprofits in the United States to the list of 200,000 platform supports today.

Change is able to make the donation process easy for users by channeling their money to a donor-advised fund called Our Change Foundation. The foundation operates as an independent entity, and accepts donations made through the Change API on behalf of the 200,000 partner non-profit organizations.

The donor-advised fund makes the process of launching a gift campaign much easier for companies and charities because they can only search for a non-profit organization from the list to be a recipient of their initiative instead of having to coordinate individually with these charities. get their crypto. wallet addresses and processes these donations manually, according to Nigam. The non-profit organizations can choose whether they want to receive crypto donations directly or whether they want the foundation to convert these donations to fiat and forward them, she added.

“For us, it’s about making it easy. We do not want people to have to copy and paste very long addresses. [With Change,] they are able to search for a charity of their choice and say, yes, sure, I give 1% [of the royalties] and just keep going, and everything will be streamlined on the chain, ”said Nigam.

Although Change plans to focus on expanding its crypto features in the short term, the startup does not plan to turn away from fiat anytime soon, according to Nigam, who explained that Change sees itself as an evergreen solution for companies to build customer loyalty through philanthropy, regardless of financial circumstances.

“Our goal over time is to be currency diagnostic. In five years, we want to drive every donation dollar online, “Shah added.