Change raises $5M in seed round

SAN FRANCISCO, July 11, 2022 /PRNewswire/ --Change, a technology giving platform, announced that it has raised $5M in seed funding co-led by Freestyle and NEA. Change's universal donation APIs connect companies to 200K+ charitable causes. After this new round of financing, the company will expand its engineering team to scale the donation platform to all major blockchains.

Change enables transparent, crypto payments for 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. Creators use Change to integrate giving directly into their web3 projects and create a tight-knit community. Change recently announced a partnership with Metaplex - the standard protocol for creating Solana NFTs - to make it easy for creators to direct a percentage of NFT sales to a cause. Change's nonprofit wallets can live directly in the NFT smart contract, a mechanism that automates donations on every sale and resale.

"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. 89% of companies believe partnering with a nonprofit leverages their ability to improve their community (NP Source). In web3, crypto wallets publicly record every transaction – from DAOs to NFTs, all activity can be traced back to the customer. "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," says Jenny Lefcourt, General Partner at Freestyle Capital.

Change provides a full suite of tools to manage donations for organizations of any size – from small, grassroots nonprofits to national organizations with multiple chapters. Make-A-Wish America accepts cryptocurrency donations online with Change's drop-in fundraising form. "With Change's platform, we're able to craft our web3 strategy without worrying about the mechanics of cryptocurrency. For us, it's an incredible fundraising opportunity to activate a new pool of donors" says Teresa Duran, Chief Information Officer at Make-A-Wish America.

"Change unlocks the collective giving power of crypto and offers a radically simple onramp for charitable organizations to partner web3 communities, brands and creators," says Ann Bordetsky, Partner at NEA. With its focus on web3, Change has also received investments from some of the biggest leaders in the space including the founders of Alchemy, Solana, and Dapper Labs.