A fundraiser at a mid-sized university has roughly 200 donors in their portfolio and, on a good day, maybe an hour to reach out to them. Do the math and the job becomes impossible - a blank email window, a spreadsheet of names, and the quiet knowledge that most of those relationships are going cold. Gravyty was built inside that math problem. Its founders looked at the gap between what a development office knows about its donors and what it actually does with that knowledge, and decided software should close it.
Started in 2016 in Boston by Adam Martel and Rich Palmer, two Babson College alumni, Gravyty began with a deceptively small idea: what if the computer wrote the first draft? Not the whole letter, not the strategy - just the awkward opening line, personalized from the donor's history, ready for a human to edit and send. The feature was called First Draft, and it turned out to be the kind of small thing that changes a workday.
A fundraiser who got tired of his own spreadsheet
Martel had worked as a gift officer before founding the company, which is the detail that explains everything about Gravyty. He was not a technologist looking for a market. He was the customer, annoyed. Nonprofits and universities collect enormous amounts of donor data - gift history, event attendance, wealth signals, engagement - and then leave most of it sitting in a database nobody has time to interrogate.
Nonprofits have so much data about donors, but they haven't been leveraging data well. So we solved the problem ourselves. Adam Martel, co-founder
The early product did two jobs. It scored and prioritized prospects - telling a fundraiser which donor was most worth a call today - and it drafted the outreach so the officer did not start from a blank page. That combination, prioritize-then-draft, is still the spine of what Gravyty sells.
There is a particular kind of guilt that lives in a development office. Every gift officer carries a portfolio far larger than any human can actually tend, which means somebody is always being neglected - the reliable annual donor who has not heard from anyone in fourteen months, the grateful patient who would give again if only asked. Gravyty's first insight was emotional as much as technical: the software was not really about efficiency, it was about lifting that guilt by making the neglected relationship the easy one to act on.
Software that hands you the next move
Most fundraising CRMs are filing cabinets. They store the record of a relationship faithfully and do almost nothing to advance it. Gravyty's bet was that the valuable part is not the storage - it is the recommendation. A development office does not need to be told what happened; it needs to be told what to do next, and ideally handed the words to do it.
That framing put Gravyty in a slightly different aisle than the incumbents. Where a traditional platform answers "what do we know about this donor," Gravyty answers "which donor, when, and what do I say." It is a subtle shift that maps neatly onto how a fundraiser's day actually runs.
The drafts themselves were never meant to hit send on their own. A gift officer opens First Draft, sees a message already shaped around the donor's giving history and last interaction, and does the human work - trimming a line, adding a detail only they would know, catching the note that would ring false. The AI removes the cost of starting; the person keeps the judgment. In an era of one-click automation, Gravyty's restraint on that point has aged unusually well, because donors can smell a form letter and a good gift officer knows it.
Who leans on it
Gravyty's user base sits in the parts of the economy that run on generosity: universities and colleges, nonprofits, hospitals and healthcare foundations, and increasingly K-12 schools. The people actually clicking the buttons are advancement teams, gift officers, and alumni-relations staff - the folks responsible for keeping a community warm and giving. More than 2,000 organizations use the platform, and the company says its technology has helped raise upward of $600 million.
It is an unglamorous market, and that is rather the point. While much of the software world chased the flashy AI use cases, Gravyty went deep on one that most people never think about: the plumbing that keeps a university's annual fund flowing and a hospital foundation's donors feeling seen.
The scale of a customer varies wildly. On one end sit small nonprofits where a single overworked director does the fundraising, the events, and the grant writing between other duties. On the other are large university advancement shops with dozens of gift officers and a formal pipeline for major gifts. Gravyty's tools have to be legible to both - simple enough that the solo director is not overwhelmed, deep enough that the university team does not feel it has outgrown them. That range is part of why the white-glove support matters; the buyer rarely has an in-house software team to lean on.
Buy the journey, don't rebuild it
In January 2020, K1 Investment Management put $21 million into the company. What followed was less a product roadmap than an assembly. Rather than build every adjacent tool from scratch, Gravyty acquired them. In 2021 it merged with Graduway, an alumni-engagement and networking platform, and folded in Gratavid, a personalized-video tool for donor thank-yous. In 2022 it added London's Fabrik for alumni mentoring and engagement. In 2025 it picked up Athlete Network, extending the community model to current and former athletes.
The logic is straightforward. The world of engagement and fundraising tools is fragmented - a video app here, a mentoring platform there, a fundraising AI somewhere else - and advancement offices hate juggling vendors. Consolidating them under one roof is a real product in itself. The First Draft AI became the front door; the acquired tools became the rest of the house.
Each acquisition also filled in a stage of a longer arc. Graduway addressed the years-long relationship a school keeps with its graduates. Fabrik added mentoring, the moment an alum gives time before they give money. Gratavid handled the thank-you, the part every fundraiser knows they should do more of and rarely finds time for. Athlete Network reached a community - former players - that institutions have historically struggled to keep close. Stitched together, they trace the full life of an engaged supporter, from first mentoring call to major gift to grateful video reply.
Where it sits on the map
The advancement-software market has a giant in the middle of it - Blackbaud, whose Raiser's Edge has been the default system of record for decades - along with a crowd of specialists: EverTrue, Bloomerang, Virtuous, Almabase, and others carving out engagement, CRM, and alumni niches. Gravyty's angle has been to sit on top of the system of record as the action layer, the thing that reads the data and tells a human what to do with it, then to widen out sideways through acquisition.
How the lights stay on
Gravyty is straightforward B2B SaaS: annual subscriptions to institutions, usually paired with white-glove implementation and support - the sort of hand-holding that matters when your buyer is a lean nonprofit team, not a software company. Growth has been a two-part engine of organic product work and steady acquisition, all backed by K1, which remains the company's principal investor.
Leadership turned over in 2024, when SaaS veteran Jay Kuhlman was named chief executive - the kind of operator brought in to take a founder-built, acquisition-assembled company and make it run as one. Co-founder Adam Martel, for his part, moved on to start Givzey, another fundraising-tech venture, which is its own small proof that the pain he first noticed as a gift officer is far from solved.
Consolidation cuts both ways, and Gravyty knows it. A suite assembled from many companies has to be woven into something that feels like one product rather than a browser full of logins, and the institutions buying it are watching to see whether the pieces genuinely talk to each other. That integration work - quieter than any acquisition announcement - is arguably the real project of the company's current chapter.
The valuable part was never the database. It was knowing which donor to call today - and not having to write the email from scratch. The Gravyty thesis, in one line
A quiet corner of AI
Gravyty is what "AI for X" looks like when X is picked carefully. Not a chatbot bolted onto a homepage, but a tool aimed at a specific, repetitive, genuinely miserable task - and a company patient enough to keep buying the pieces around it. The name is a play on gravity, the pull that keeps a community coming back to give. Nine years in, the company is betting that pull is worth engineering, one first draft at a time.