Salomon Serfati

The plumbing for generosity

Salomon Serfati runs Chariot, a New York company that does something deceptively dull and quietly radical: it lets you pay a nonprofit straight from a donor-advised fund the way you tap Apple Pay for coffee. The product is called DAFpay. It sits as a button on more than 100,000 donation forms - the American Cancer Society, Memorial Sloan Kettering, his own alma mater the University of Pennsylvania - and in 2025 TIME called it one of the best inventions of the year.

The number that animates him is $326 billion. That is roughly how much sits parked in donor-advised funds, the fastest-growing slice of American philanthropy. Money already pledged to charity, already tax-deducted, just waiting. The reason so much of it stays put, Serfati figured out, is embarrassingly simple: paying from a DAF used to mean logging into a separate portal, copying account numbers, waiting weeks. Most people are asked to give in a moment of feeling. The plumbing killed the moment.

"Lines of code are moving millions of dollars to people in need."

So he wrote the plumbing. Chariot turns a multi-redirect ordeal into three clicks, then reconciles the donation data on the back end so the nonprofit's finance team isn't left guessing. Hundreds of millions of dollars now flow through the rails he and his co-founders built, embedded in platforms like GoFundMe and GiveButter.

Before there was a company, there was an Excel sheet. When Serfati earned his first paycheck, he opened a checking account holding exactly 10% of his income and logged every donation by hand. The habit came from his upbringing - born in Caracas, raised in a tight-knit Jewish community in Miami, schooled at Scheck Hillel. The principle is called ma'aser: give away a tenth.

"Everyone's taught us that we should donate tzedakah," he has said, "but we've never been given a good structure of how to practically follow it." That gap between the value and the mechanics is the whole company in a sentence.

At Penn he studied computer science and was a President's Innovation Prize finalist. At eighteen he had already shipped a roommate-matching app that pulled 5,000 users in two months. He went to BlackRock as a backend engineer, built the team's first external API gateway with mTLS and OAuth, and earned an outperformance rating. Then he and his college roommate Aaron Kahane made a pact to give away 10% of their income every year - and discovered that actually doing it was a paperwork nightmare.

His first swing, MyTenPercent, launched in 2021 and quickly bumped into competitors. He pivoted, teamed up with Kahane and designer Drew Schneider, and Chariot was born in March 2022. By summer they were in Y Combinator.