affordability
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Forage
Forage is a San Francisco payments company that makes it easy for retailers and online platforms to accept government benefits like SNAP EBT, WIC, and HSA/FSA. It is one of only a handful of third-party processors approved by the USDA to handle online EBT, pairing a unified merchant API with hands-on certification support. On the consumer side, its Forage app helps low-income families check their EBT balance, find discounts, and earn rewards. The technology runs at more than 100,000 stores across all 50 states, including Dollar General, Save A Lot, Gopuff, DoorDash, and Uber Eats.
Niles Lichtenstein
Niles Lichtenstein is the CEO and Co-Founder of Nestment, a San Francisco-based platform helping first-time homebuyers purchase property through co-buying and expert coaching. Shaped by watching his immigrant mother rent rooms in their Berkeley home to stay afloat after his father's death, Lichtenstein spent a decade quietly co-buying properties with friends and family before formalizing the model into Nestment in 2021. The company has since raised $3.5M in pre-seed funding and facilitated over $200M in real estate transactions, with 74% of buyers being first-timers and 62% identifying as BIPOC or immigrants. Before Nestment, he founded The History Project (later Enwoven), a digital storytelling platform backed by The New York Times Company that powered Ambassador Richard Holbrooke's history into an HBO documentary.