GiveCampus, a D.C. startup that helps public and private schools raise money, has just raked in $50 million of its own — marking the first significant fundraising round in its seven-year history.
The company, which has seen demand for its fundraising services increase in recent years, said Monday it plans to put the capital toward hiring. Now with 75 employees across 23 states and the District, GiveCampus has roughly doubled its headcount over the past 20 months. And it’s shooting to again double its staff over the next 20 months, said GiveCampus co-founder and CEO Kestrel Linder.
A substantial chunk of those roles will sit in product management, software engineering and design because “we have a lot of product to build,” Linder said. The team also intends to add customer service, and sales and marketing positions, since “we also expect to significantly grow our customer base,” he said.
GiveCampus now has open positions in business development, engineering, finance, talent, product, and sales and marketing. Prior to the pandemic, the business counted about 30 people — and had moved to a larger headquarters in Capitol Riverfront to accommodate its growth while rolling out new products on its platform.
To that end, the company is also continuing to develop new products — and plans to put the new backing toward speeding up that work. It involves adding more software for outbound marketing, communications, and event registration and management, according to Linder, who declined to share further details.
The GiveCampus software today consists of a handful of products to facilitate fundraising for nonprofit universities, colleges and K-12 schools. Its social fundraising platform provides crowdfunding and other campaigns, similar to Kickstarter or GoFundMe. It also includes a management system for volunteers, giving forms to post on a school’s website for year-round raising, video spotlights, a tool to identify high-net-worth donors and a mobile point-of-sale system for in-person gifts.
“We aspire to become synonymous with fundraising for education, and achieving that means providing all of the software that fundraisers need to carry out their most important work,” Linder told the Washington Business Journal. “We’ve made meaningful progress toward this goal over the last seven years, but we have a long way to go and a very ambitious roadmap in front of us.”
Boston growth equity firm Silversmith Capital Partners led the $50 million round while also committing “significant additional capital” for what’s called a tender offer, which invites employees to cash out — and frees up stock for investors who want to scoop up more stake.
Linder declined to disclose the amount of funding committed for the tender offer because it has not yet concluded. But, he said, “we specifically structured the financing to include this [tender offer] from Silversmith” because “it was very important to us to be able to provide an opportunity for our employees to obtain some liquidity.”
With the investment, Silversmith co-founder and Managing Partner Jim Quagliaroli has joined the GiveCampus board of directors.
The financing also came from individuals including Michael Seibel, managing director of Mountain View, California-based tech accelerator Y Combinator; Claire Hughes Johnson, corporate officer and advisor for San Francisco financial platform Stripe; and Mike Volpe, vice president at Capital One Financial Corp. and founding member of Cambridge, Massachusetts-based HubSpot.
“Fundraising is a critical component of school budgets. Without effective fundraising, schools face a choice between cutting budgets or increasing tuition and fees, both of which harm students and especially students from less advantaged backgrounds,” Quagliaroli said in a statement. “GiveCampus is a game changer, helping schools of every shape and size advance their missions through significantly improved fundraising outcomes.”
Now with a revenue run rate of more than $20 million, GiveCampus “wanted to find a strategic partner to help us navigate that next phase of growth” and Silversmith has “an incredibly successful track record of doing just this,” Linder said, adding that he’s now eyeing a $100 million revenue run rate as the next target.
“The capital they’ve invested will empower us to move more boldly, make bigger bets, and try new approaches, but it was a secondary consideration,” he said. “The primary goal of this financing was to bring more expertise and experience into the company.”
Back in 2014, Linder had quit his job as an associate with Booz Allen Hamilton to start GiveCampus with co-founder Michael Kong. The business broke even by January 2016 and has since been profitable, he said. It had previously raised less than $1 million in outside capital from friends and family, seed and angel investors, and the Y Combinator accelerator.
To date, GiveCampus has supported more than $2 billion in giving for the more than 1,000 schools using its platform. It has also donated $1 million in free support to programs that serve underrepresented, low-income and first-generation students through its Social Mobility Initiative, and gave educational institutions free access to its platform during the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic.
