Volunteer management platform Civic Champs announced the close of a $615,000 preseed investment round that will help enable the Pittsburgh-based startup to expand its product offerings later this year.
The Richard King Mellon Foundation put forth the largest investment into the startup's second preseed round followed by North Side-based preseed and seed-stage startup investment firm Innovation Works. Other angel investors also participated in the round, which took about six months to raise and now brings the startup's total funding to $1.6 million since its founding in 2019 by CEO Geng Wang and CTO Mike Jeffery.
According to Wang, the funding will allow the startup to secure several main initiatives by the year's end, the first being the launch of a self-service product for nonprofits and other volunteer-based organizations that will be at a reduced cost compared to its already existing lowest tier offering. This product will differ from the startup's current volunteer management-based tool in that it won't require a human to monitor or assist with an organization's respective volunteer needs.
Civic Champs is also working on an integration initiative with cloud computing provider Blackbaud Inc. (NASDAQ: BLKB) as part of Blackbaud's Social Good Startup Program to better deploy Civic Champ's offerings to the nearly 20,000 nonprofits that are already using Blackbaud services. Civic Champs currently counts 61 nonprofits and other organizations as being a part of its customer base.
"I'm super grateful for the support, and obviously a little bit relieved to be done, at least for a duration," Wang said of the funding round's close. "I think it's incredible that people are willing to invest so much in this idea that we have and this platform that we're trying to build. That's really neat and everyone who invests usually becomes supporters and champions and so we've been able to sort of grow that base of folks who are looking for us to succeed and that's super exciting as well."
As for what comes next, Wang said he's hoping Civic Champs will be able to show "significant growth" of three to four times its current valuation by the end of the year and following the launch of its self-service product, among other completed objectives. Doing so will also require the hiring of several new employees — the current count stands at 11 full-time workers — as Civic Champs has open roles in product development, sales and operations.
