The new capital and partnership will accelerate Chariot’s build out of critical giving infrastructure that will expand philanthropy and improve the work of nonprofits.
Today, we’re incredibly excited to share that we have closed our $11 million Series A investment round, led by Maveron. Dan Levitan, who co-founded Maveron in 1998 with Starbucks founder Howard Schultz, has also joined our board of directors. Exclusive coverage of the round by Axios can be found here, and you can read Maveron’s announcement here.
Typically, when you meet with an investor for the first time, they spend the majority of the conversation trying to dig into the ins and outs of the business. Maveron was different. They first wanted to deeply understand the team: what our values were and what we stood for. With that foundation, they started to evaluate the business more closely. Maveron believes that the best companies are built by teams that have a profound care for their customers—a philosophy we wholeheartedly share.
Maveron also counts many large nonprofits as their own LPs (limited partner investors), and their leadership team is extremely active in the nonprofit community. We all believe that the world desperately needs more giving, and that modern payments technology custom-built for philanthropy can unlock the exponential growth in generosity we’ve all been waiting for. For Chariot and the thousands of nonprofits we support, we couldn’t imagine a more fitting Series A lead.
We founded Chariot in early 2022, after we stumbled upon a major gap in the online giving ecosystem. We were seeking tools to help us stay accountable to our own goal of giving 10% of our income to charity and found out about Donor-Advised Funds (DAFs).
Check out our founding story to learn more about our journey from spreadsheets to track our 10% giving goals, to building new payment infrastructure dedicated to giving!
A DAF is a charitable giving account that lets you make tax-deductible contributions, invest the balance, and grant out to charities over time. As we adopted the vehicle ourselves, and encouraged our network to use DAFs as well, we saw some incredible impact. People got more involved with their philanthropy, set goals, and significantly increased their giving – but there was a major problem.
We couldn’t use our DAF dollars in any of the places online we were most inspired to give: a nonprofit’s website, a friend’s birthday fundraiser, a family member’s marathon page, etc. If DAFs aren’t usable where most people give, we knew they weren’t a complete solution to maximize philanthropy.
DAFs hold $230 billion in assets and grant out over $52 billion per year to nonprofits on behalf of over 3 million people using DAFs. It’s the fastest growing segment of philanthropy, by far, but that’s still just the tip of the iceberg.
We set out to build a payment option that could be embedded into any donation form, making DAFs easier to use than a credit card and putting DAFs front-and-center for the millions of people giving online that could also use a DAF to expand their own philanthropy. With proper DAF payments infrastructure in place, we expect DAFs to become as common as 401(k)s in the near future - which are used by over 60 million Americans.
Chariot now powers seamless DAF giving for tens of thousands of nonprofits charities, including some of the most well-known nonprofits in the country, like Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Central Park Conservancy, Boys & Girls Club of America, Pan-Mass Challenge, and March of Dimes.
DAFpay is also now a primary payment option on leading fundraising platforms like GoFundMe charity pages, Givebutter , DonorDrive, Springboard by Jackson River, Engaging Networks, and dozens more. We are already driving millions in new online DAF Giving by thousands of donors, and we’re only getting started.
“We are very excited to be partnered with Chariot as they help make charitable giving through DAFs a better experience for charities, donors and DAF providers,” shares Dan Levitan, Co-Founder and Partner at Maveron.
“The Chariot team is fully aligned with these three constituencies to increase the amount and ease of giving via DAFs.”
This new investment will allow us to ensure that DAFpay is present in every place that someone could donate online and expand our technology to solve more problems in the DAF ecosystem.
Thank you to all of our nonprofit, fundraising platform,s and DAF partners that have made it possible for our technology to reach millions of people, making a new form of easy DAF giving finally possible. We owe a special shout out to our Nonprofit Advisory Council who has been an integral part of our journey so far.
Maveron was joined in this round by our seed investors – Spark Capital, SV Angel and Y Combinator – as well as a long list of inspiring angel investors – Adam Grant, Angela Duckworth, Mike Massaro, Ben Golub, Adam Nash, and many others.
Our fully in-person and high-energy team is growing. Join us!
Sincerely,
Salo, Aaron & Drew
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