# Sonia Nigam

> Sonia Nigam is the co-founder and CEO of Change, a San Francisco fintech that turns charitable giving into a few lines of code. Brands drop a Change button into checkout and the company handles the unglamorous machinery behind it - vetting, compliance, and disbursement across more than 200,000 nonprofits. A Northwestern computer science and business grad who engineered frictionless payments at Braintree and Venmo, Nigam quit her job at the start of the pandemic to build the donations API she wished existed. She and co-founder Amar Shah landed on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for social impact and raised a $5M seed round to bring giving on-chain.

- **Role:** Co-founder & CEO at Change
- **Organizations:** Change (getchange.io), Braintree, Venmo
- **Nationality:** American
- **Education:** Computer Science and Business, Northwestern University
- **Known for:** Co-founded and leads Change, a donations API connecting brands to 200,000+ vetted nonprofits, Named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for social impact, Raised a $5M seed round (total funding reported around $5.75M-$6.46M) from Freestyle Capital, NEA, and founders of Alchemy, Solana, and Dapper Labs

## Career timeline

- **pre-2020** — Engineered frictionless payments at Braintree and Venmo
- **2020** — Co-founded Change with Amar Shah during the early COVID-19 pandemic
- **2022** — Change raised a $5M seed round co-led by Freestyle Capital and NEA
- **2022** — Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 for social impact alongside co-founder Amar Shah

## Achievements

- Co-founded and leads Change, a donations API connecting brands to 200,000+ vetted nonprofits
- Named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for social impact
- Raised a $5M seed round (total funding reported around $5.75M-$6.46M) from Freestyle Capital, NEA, and founders of Alchemy, Solana, and Dapper Labs
- Pioneered transparent on-chain charitable donations across Ethereum, Solana, and Flow
- Earned earliest customers through direct, in-person storefront pitching

## Latest updates

- **2022-07** — Announced a $5M seed round to scale the engineering team and expand on-chain donations across major blockchains.

## Links

- Website: https://getchange.io
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sonia-nigam-25aa68a0/
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/sonia_nigam
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8OXj1SLKxw

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/sonia-nigam
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-06-21