Givestar, a fundraising technology startup, has raised £9 million in growth funding led by Mercia Ventures, with participation from Love Ventures. Funds will support expansion in the UK and US, product development and team growth.
After its co-founders saw that charitable giving had failed to keep pace with an increasingly cashless world, givestar started out by turning smartphones into contactless donation points. The business has since grown into a platform that connects charities, fundraisers, donors and events, covering digital fundraising, event fundraising, supporter engagement and charity stewardship. Charities use it to acquire supporters, activate fundraisers and build longer-term relationships. With 76% of users under 35, the platform also connects charities with the generation they have found hardest to reach.
As the official fundraising platform for event partners including RunThrough, Tough Mudder UK, Spartan UK, Ultra Events and Ultra X, givestar is built into hundreds of events, so charities can reach and recruit new fundraisers at the moment they sign up to take part. Events bring new fundraisers into the givestar community, fundraisers bring donors, and charities gain supporters they can keep engaging long after a single event or campaign finishes.
To date, nearly 800,000 user accounts have been created on givestar, helping raise more than $70 million from millions of donors for over 4,000 charities. Active fundraisers are up 225% this year. In the US, givestar already has partnerships across more than 70 events, including Bay to Breakers, the Las Vegas Marathon and the Portland Marathon. Earlier this year, Spartan and Tough Mudder appointed givestar as their Official U.S. Fundraising Partner, bringing its fundraising technology to hundreds of thousands of participants annually. The new funding will support further expansion of givestar's presence, partnerships and team across the country.
When we started givestar, we'd noticed that young people hadn't stopped caring about causes - they'd just stopped carrying cash. So we put the collection tin on the phone. But we quickly realised the opportunity was much bigger. Fundraising is still fragmented across events, fundraisers, donors and charities. We're building the technology layer that connects those worlds, creating a community that makes giving and fundraising more engaging and ultimately powers modern fundraising. This investment gives us the firepower to take that ambition much further, particularly in the US.
Fundraising behaviour has changed significantly over the past decade, but much of the technology supporting charities has struggled to keep pace. What stood out to us about givestar was not only the technology the team has built, but the network they are creating around it. By partnering with some of the biggest participation events in the UK and establishing an early foothold across more than 70 events in the US, they are embedding fundraising into the places where it naturally begins. Tom, Alex and the wider team have already built impressive momentum, and we are excited to support them as they continue building the technology and community connecting charities, events, fundraisers and donors, with the ambition to become the technology layer powering modern fundraising.
