Resilia.

Resilia is a bet that this gap is a business. The company, founded in New Orleans by Sevetri Wilson, makes software for two groups of people who don’t usually think of themselves as software buyers: nonprofits that need to become stronger organizations, and the funders - foundations, corporations, governments, and, increasingly, banks - who write them checks and then, historically, hope for the best.

The hoping-for-the-best part is the interesting one. If you are a foundation, giving away money is deceptively hard. You can write a grant, but you cannot easily see whether the grantee spent the next eighteen months building capacity or quietly drowning. Resilia’s pitch is that the grant is only step one. The platform adds the steps after: on-demand courses, templates, fundraising tools, and one-on-one coaching for the nonprofit, plus dashboards that let the funder actually watch impact accrue instead of taking it on faith.

Wilson did not arrive at this by way of a computer science degree. She started her first company, a public relations firm serving nonprofits, right after graduating from Louisiana State University in 2009. Working with nonprofits taught her where the paperwork bodies were buried, and her first product, ExemptMeNow, automated the least romantic thing in the sector: filing for 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status. It is a testament to how bad that process is that a company could be built on making it less bad.

Then came the realization that incorporation was step one of about a hundred. A newly exempt nonprofit still cannot fundraise well, report to funders, train its board, or measure whether it is doing any good. So ExemptMeNow became Resilia, and a filing utility became a two-sided platform - the kind of pivot that reads as obvious in retrospect and terrifying in the moment.

Most software wants to replace people. Resilia’s more interesting choice is to keep them. The platform pairs self-serve courses and tools with actual human coaching, which is not the cheapest way to build a SaaS company but is arguably the only way to serve organizations whose problems are as much about confidence and know-how as about features.

The company organizes itself around operating principles that read less like a pitch deck and more like a manifesto: Be Lionhearted, Put Nonprofits First, Move the Needle, Elevate Equity, and Create Gathering Places. The through-line is trust-based philanthropy - the idea that funders should support grantees for the long haul rather than making them re-audition for every dollar.

Geography matters here too. Resilia is headquartered in New Orleans, not the Bay Area, with a foothold in New York. That is partly Wilson’s roots and partly the point: the company is close to the “philanthropy deserts” - underserved regions where nonprofits are thin and support is thinner - that it says it wants to reach. Proximity, in this business, is a feature.

None of this would matter if the software were ignored. It is not. Enterprise customers include Oxfam America, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Goldman Sachs’s One Million Black Women Initiative, the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, the United States Tennis Association Foundation, and The Boston Foundation - the sort of institutions that do not adopt a New Orleans startup’s dashboard on a whim.