Chariot.

The most willing donors had the worst experience

A donor-advised fund is a tax-advantaged account you fund now and grant out over time. It is, on paper, the most committed money in philanthropy - the donor has already decided to give it away. The catch is the plumbing. Granting from a DAF online used to mean leaving the nonprofit's site, logging into a separate sponsor portal, copying account numbers, and hoping the gift arrived weeks later with no name attached.

So nonprofits did the unglamorous part by hand. Development teams reconciled mystery checks, matched them to donors, and re-keyed the data into their systems. Industry-wide, that manual gift processing burns through millions of hours a year. The money was willing. The pipes were Victorian.

Pictured, in spirit: a fundraiser at 9pm matching a $5,000 check to a donor who forgot to write their name on it. Chariot's origin story, basically.

Three roommates, one pledge, a fintech by accident

Salo Serfati and Aaron Kahane were roommates at the University of Pennsylvania when they made a deal: donate 10% of their income, every year. Managing that promise through spreadsheets is what showed them how outdated charitable infrastructure had become. Their first product was MyTen, a card built for giving. It was the wrong product, but it pointed at the right wall - donor-advised funds, and how badly they worked online.

Drew Schneider, who had worked with Kahane at Bain & Company, joined as the third co-founder and chief product officer. The trio took the idea - a DAF payment option that lived right on the donation form - into Y Combinator's Summer 2022 batch. They walked in with a button and walked out building a payment network.

One button, then the rest of the workflow

DAFpay is the headline act: the first DAF-specific payment option for online donation forms. What used to be a maze of redirects became roughly three clicks. But Chariot did not stop at the donate moment. Its Gift Processing platform points customizable language models at incoming gifts - automatically coding donations and formatting exports that sync with a nonprofit's existing CRM and accounting tools. Its Disbursements product lets grantmakers and community foundations send, enrich, and track grant payments through a single portal with verification built in.

The unsexy genius: most of Chariot's work happens after the confetti, in the spreadsheet nobody tweets about.

The numbers that make skeptics quiet down

The case for Chariot is not a vibe; it is a volume chart. DAFpay now rides on the donation forms of household-name nonprofits - Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Central Park Conservancy, Boys & Girls Clubs of America, Pan-Mass Challenge, March of Dimes. It is distributed through 70-plus fundraising platform partners including GoFundMe, Givebutter, DonorDrive, Springboard by Jackson River, and Engaging Networks. Blood Cancer United raised $3 million through it. And the average DAFpay gift runs about $1,000 - roughly four times a typical online donation.

The Series A, $11 million led by Maveron - the consumer-focused firm co-founded by former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz - came in August 2024. Spark Capital, SV Angel, and Y Combinator joined, alongside a roster of angels that reads like a behavioral-science syllabus: Adam Grant, Angela Duckworth, Mike Massaro, Ben Golub, Adam Nash.

Infrastructure, not applause

Chariot frames itself as plumbing, which is an oddly humble pitch for a company on a TIME list. Its stated mission is to build the infrastructure that powers giving - connecting donors, nonprofits, and platforms with frictionless DAF donations, faster payouts, and built-in verification. The vision behind it: make generosity more accessible by modernizing the rails, and unlock the potential of that $326 billion sitting in DAF accounts.

Not everyone cheers. Critics of donor-advised funds argue the vehicle can park money indefinitely while donors collect the tax benefit upfront. Chariot's answer is mechanical rather than rhetorical: make granting so easy that the parked money actually moves. Whether you love DAFs or distrust them, faster outflow is the rare thing both camps can want.

A fintech whose proudest metric is how fast it gives money away. The category practically invented itself to be misunderstood.

The button is becoming the standard

Go back to that person staring at a donation page. A few years ago, the DAF option either didn't exist or sent them on a detour they often abandoned. Now there's a button. They tap it, confirm, and the gift lands - coded, named, reconciled - in the nonprofit's system without a development assistant re-keying anything at 9pm. The donor's intent and the charity's bank account finally meet in the same three clicks.

That is the whole game. Chariot didn't make people more generous; it removed the reasons they gave up. As DAF balances keep growing and more platforms treat DAFpay as table stakes, the company's bet is that the giving rail becomes invisible - the way card payments did. The best infrastructure is the kind you stop noticing. Chariot is trying to disappear into the donate button, and so far, the button is winning.