Quick take:
- Change is bringing donations on chain.
- The platform enables transparent, crypto donations on leading blockchains like Ethereum, Solana, and Flow.
- Change streamlines the donation process for users by collecting and distributing donations via a donor-advised fund called Our Change Foundation.
Donation startup, Change, today announced that it has raised $5 million in seed funding, co-led by Freestyle and NEA. Shrug Capital participated in the round, alongside existing investors Solana, Alchemy and Dapper Labs, which also contributed to the startup’s pre-seed round.
Change’s universal donation APIs connect companies to more than 200,000 charitable causes. It also enables s transparent, crypto donations on leading blockchains like Ethereum, Solana, and Flow.
“The power of blockchain is in its transparency and accountability. By bringing donations on-chain, every creator’s social impact becomes publicly verifiable at scale,” Sonia Nigam, CEO, and co-founder of Change.
Founded in 2020 by Sonia Nigam and Amar Shah, Change began as a platform that streamlined the process for anyone to make donations online. The startup works with companies that use its APIs to enable online donations and communicate their mission through charitable campaigns.
Besides the two co-founders, Change only has one full-time employee. With the new funds, Change aims to double its team by the end of the year to scale the donation platform to all major blockchains.
The startup recently announced a partnership with Metaplex – the standard protocol for creating Solana NFTs – to allow creators to allocate a percentage of NFT sales to a cause. Change’s non-profit wallets live directly in the NFT smart contract, which automates donations on every sale and resale.
As crypto wallets publicly record every transaction, from DAOs to NFTs, all activity can be traced back to the customer. “Every transaction is a public reflection of a consumer’s personal beliefs, so it’s never been more important for companies and creators to find value alignment with their community,” says Amar Shah, President and co-founder of Change.
Echoing his sentiments, Jenny Lefcourt, General Partner at Freestyle Capital said: “Crypto wallets showcase the causes and communities people support, interests, collections and more – they are ultimately a person’s identity. Wallets showcasing donations and nonprofit NFTs are an obvious next step.”
Working with a group of advisors as well as GuideStar – an information service specialising in reporting on U.S. nonprofit companies – to vet its list of charities by assessing their publicly available disclosures, Change cut down a list of 1.5 million US-based non-profits to the 200,000 it supports today.
Change streamlines the donation process for users by collecting and distributing donations via a donor-advised fund called Our Change Foundation, an independent entity that works on behalf of Change’s 200,000 partner non-profits.
Companies and charities can also easily launch a charitable campaign via Change by simply searching for a non-profit from the list to be their beneficiary instead of individually coordinating with the charities.
Even though it is planning to focus on building out its crypto capabilities, Change isn’t moving away from fiat. It aims to be currency agnostic in five years.
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