GiveCampus: Offering a fundraising platform for public and private schools

Editor’s note: At the start of the year, we look at which young companies have caught our eye for hitting a milestone, bringing in funding or growing its revenue base. This company has made our list of our Startups to Watch for 2023. See them all here.

Founders Kestrel Linder and Michael Kong have fond memories of their alma mater, John Hopkins University — but weren’t fans of how the university solicited for their donations. In their minds, the letters in the mail and phone calls beseeching them for money were antiquated, and they had a mind to bring such universities into the 21st century.

Their D.C. startup helps public and private schools raise money via its fundraising platform, which provides crowdfunding and other campaigns, similar to Kickstarter or GoFundMe. It also offers 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.

In the fall of 2022, the company got a huge boost to realize more of its goals — it completed a $50 million raise led by Boston growth equity firm Silversmith Capital Partners. That marked GiveCampus’ first-ever sizable fundraising, said Linder, its CEO. Until then, he said, the startup had been cash-flow positive for its prior seven years.

Now with those new dollars in hand, it plans to grow by about a third to more than 100 people this year, hiring software developers, product managers, and sales and marketing staff.

The company is also deploying the capital to build more technology specifically and exclusively for fundraisers at K-12 schools, as well as universities. Its client roster already includes Georgetown University, University of Virginia and, in a full-circle moment, Johns Hopkins.

Its future plans also entail launching two new product lines in the first quarter of this year, but the founding duo declined to get into specifics.

Last fall, GiveCampus said it helped 1,000 schools on its platform raise more than $2 billion combined. As part of that, it also used its Social Mobility Initiative to donate $1 million in free support to programs that serve underrepresented, low-income and first-generation-American students.

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