Givzey

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Founder: Adam Martel
Founding: 2021
Mission: Empower fundraisers to easily and immediately formalize and book pledges of all sizes by scaling multi-year giving strategies to all levels of giving
Employees: 10 & 60% Local
Workplace: Hybrid
Stage & Capital Raised: Seed & $2.1M raised
Investors: York IE, members of Tiger 21, Orr Group, members of Launchpad Venture Group, and Various Angels
Key Customers: Bucknell University, College of Charleston, William & Mary, U.C. Davis
Glassdoor Rating: N/A
Valuation (estimated): <$50M
^ this is a useless number. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!

Givzey is a “software platform for nonprofit fundraising” serving institutional giving and large non-profit organizations. Founder & CEO Adam Martel has been in institutional gift giving for more than a decade, working for higher education institutions like Emmanuel College and Babson. 

From Babson, Adam co-founded Gravyty, a Boston-based software company building AI tools using natural language processing to aid frontline fundraisers. They built productivity tools to help with customized donor messaging and helped store donor information more securely. Gravyty was one of the first AI companies in the non-profit space, received a majority investment from private equity firm K-1 in 2020, and was merged with Graduway in 2021 after raising $25M from investors. When the deal closed, Adam was ready for his next act and launched Givzey the next day.

The original premise of the business was to create a “give now, pay later” concept similar to the popular B.N.P.L. (buy now pay later) movement popularized by Affirm or Klarna, so donors could split their gifts. Givzey soon evolved to become a gift agreement & donor retention platform. Then things took off. 

With such deep experience in the institutional giving space, Adam and the Givzey team are uniquely positioned to build fundraising tech for fundraisers. Pretend your alma mater reaches out to you. They might say “Hey Van, you attended Coolidge College for 7 years. How would you like to support us for the next 7 years?” Then they might send over a PDF for you to fill out with your credit card information or a mailing address where you can drop a check in the mail. Growth PMs reading this are cringing. Imagine the conversion dropoff!

Givzey streamlines this whole process for institutions and donors. They send donors an email with a link, outlining the agreement and dollar amounts over the mutually agreed upon timeline. Donors simply need one click to confirm pledges or pay gifts. Givzey built out a full invoicing platform to hold donors accountable, send reminders, and empower organizations to collect payment on multi-year agreements after that initial pledge agreement. In summary, Givezy is a combination of DocuSign and Quickbooks for nonprofits, helping to create a new category in the nonprofit fundraising sector by taking a solutions based approach and gift fundraisers better tools.

Givezy services three main verticals – higher education, large non-profits, and hospitals & healthcare systems. Their data shows that there are roughly 1.5M non-profits in the U.S. and their platform is a fit for the “enterprise” bucket of this market. Approximately 21,000 large organizations nationwide have fully staffed fundraising departments which can support enterprise contracts.

Their delivery model is an annual SaaS subscription and they do not charge donors or institutions at the individual transaction level. Similar to DocuSign, they generate the gift contracts and then handle fulfillment all the way through invoicing from agreement to cash receipt, displacing the paper process that makes donors wary and limits a nonprofit’s ability to manage multi-year giving at scale.

William & Mary, a liberal arts college in Virginia, secured $500k in gifts in under 3 months using Givzey’s platform by leveraging its seamless onboarding and multi-year commitment product. They secured average gifts of $2,500 across a number of campus organizations and, to date have even received multiple $100k gifts through the platform. Another regional non-profit was able to secure $200k in 30 minutes after transitioning their pledges from an internal system to Givzey.

Givezy is currently growing revenue 500% quarter over quarter, with a goal to become the first $100M non-profit focused enterprise company in the next 3-4 years. They aim to reach 100+ enterprise customers by the end of the year and recently closed their $2.1m Seed fundraise with participation from York IE, members of Launchpad Venture Group and Tiger 21, the Orr Group, and various Angels. Givzey might also be one of the fastest growing non-profit focused startups..ever?

The team is made up of 10 employees and plans to grow to 30 in the next 18-24 months. They’re hiring pretty aggressively across Sales & Engineering roles to make sure they can support their expanding roadmap and fulfill all qualified demos on the GTM end. Culturally, many of them come from a gift giving background and the company exists to make sure they can take care of their team and do great work, helping drive institutional giving to another level empowering the organizations and donors of tomorrow.

Operators to Know:

My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the Givzey team if I missed any up & coming operators internally

Key Roles To Be Hired:

If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:

  • What are the key product & company milestones for the next 12 months?
  • Which product features are most requested to help unlock larger potential customers?
  • What are the biggest challenges as you scale the team to 25 employees?
  • What are the most important roles you’ll be looking to add in 2024 // teams that need the most help?

We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about Givzey you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more institutional giving into the digital age. All donors applaud your efforts. See you around town!

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