She spent her early career making it easy to pay. Then she decided to make it just as easy to give.
Ask most people what a donations API looks like and you get a blank stare. Ask Sonia Nigam and you get the company she runs. As co-founder and CEO of Change, she has spent the last several years building the unglamorous machinery that sits behind a single button - the one a brand drops into its checkout so a shopper can round up, give, or send a slice of a sale to a cause. The button is the easy part. What Nigam built underneath it is the hard part: connecting, vetting, and integrating with more than 200,000 charitable organizations so that a company never has to.
That is the whole trick of her career. Take something that feels like it should be simple - paying a friend, tipping a charity - and engineer away every ounce of friction until it disappears. She learned the craft on money first. Before Change, Nigam wrote code for frictionless payments at Braintree and at Venmo, two of the companies that taught a generation to move money with a thumb. She knew exactly how much invisible work hides behind a transaction that feels effortless.
So when she looked at charitable giving - still clumsy, still paperwork-heavy, still bolted on as an afterthought - she saw a payments problem wearing a different coat. Change is her answer: make social impact a default feature of commerce rather than a once-a-year campaign. "Giving at the speed of culture" is how she has framed it. The idea is that generosity should move as fast as e-commerce does, because right now it doesn't.
Her favorite cause tells you something about how she got here. "I love Girls Who Code and their commitment to helping girls develop an interest in software engineering," she says. The engineer who builds giving infrastructure roots for the program that makes more engineers. It is a tidy loop, and she is standing inside it.
The founding myth here is refreshingly unheroic. Nigam and Amar Shah were two Northwestern grads in their first real jobs, and they were bored. So they did what bored engineers do - they started brainstorming, and they kept landing on the same problem: why was it so hard to process a donation? The idea for an API that handled the whole mess outlasted the boredom that produced it.
Then COVID-19 arrived in 2020, and the abstract idea got a deadline. Both founders quit their jobs to build it full time. There was no warm intro pipeline, no growth-hacking playbook. To get the first customers, they walked up to storefronts and pitched the owners in person. A donations platform whose first sales channel was, more or less, a doorbell.
That hand-to-hand beginning shaped the culture they tried to protect as the company grew - close-knit, scrappy, allergic to the idea that good work has to feel corporate. The grassroots instinct never left. It is the same instinct that has Change chasing causes most fintechs would never touch.
Most charity runs on trust you can't see. You give, money disappears into an organization, and you hope. Nigam's bet is that hope is a bad user experience. When Change raised its seed round, the pitch leaned hard into transparency: bring donations on-chain across Ethereum, Solana, and Flow, and every dollar of impact becomes publicly verifiable - not in a glossy annual report, but in a record anyone can check.
The round was co-led by Freestyle Capital and NEA, with a guest list that read like a who's-who of the on-chain world: founders from Alchemy, Solana, and Dapper Labs. The money was earmarked for the least flashy thing imaginable - hiring more engineers to scale the plumbing. That is the Nigam pattern again. The glamour is in the mission; the work is in the infrastructure.
Change has stretched the same idea in directions that sound improbable until you see the through-line: charitable sweepstakes, giving baked into loyalty programs, even charitable NFTs that route a slice of every sale to a nonprofit through a smart contract. Different shapes, one belief - that giving should be a feature shipped by default, not a virtue summoned once a year.
Sonia Nigam and co-founder Amar Shah on building generosity into the way brands and creators already work.
Her company started because two people were bored at their first jobs - not because of a grand vision.
The first sales strategy was knocking on storefront doors and pitching owners face to face.
She built money-movement code at both Braintree and Venmo before founding her own fintech.
Her favorite cause is Girls Who Code - the program that grows the next generation of engineers like her.
She'd rather hire engineers than buy ads. The seed money went to scaling the plumbing.