charitable-giving
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The Startup Turning Charity Into a Feed You Actually Want to Scroll
Jason Hausske wants giving to feel less like a year-end tax chore and more like a habit you post about. His bet: philanthropy grows when it stops being private.
Austin Community Foundation
Austin Community Foundation has turned one woman’s $30,000 bequest into a $669 million piece of civic infrastructure. Its real product is not charity paperwork - it is making local generosity easier to deploy, harder to waste and patient enough to outlive the donor.
Shawn Melamed
Shawn Melamed is the co-founder and CEO of Spiral, a New York fintech that plugs charitable giving into the banking apps of credit unions and community banks. Before Spiral he ran Morgan Stanley's Technology Business Development and Innovation Offices and built two prior fintech companies, StrikeNET (sold to TMX Group) and Correlix. He was named one of The Financial Technology Report's Top 50 Fintech CEOs of 2024.
Change
Change is a San Francisco fintech that lets businesses plug charitable giving directly into their products. Its Donations API and compliance dashboard connect companies to more than a million U.S. nonprofits, automating the tedious parts of giving - nonprofit verification, fund disbursement, and the tangle of state fundraising regulations like California's AB 488. Companies such as Lyft, Brex, and Bonfire use Change to run round-ups, sweepstakes, loyalty-point donations, and percentage-of-purchase campaigns without building giving infrastructure themselves.
Chariot
Chariot is a New York fintech building the payment infrastructure for charitable giving. Its flagship product, DAFpay, is the first donation option that lets people give directly from a donor-advised fund in a few clicks, and it now appears on the donation forms of more than 100,000 nonprofits. Chariot also helps charities receive, code, and reconcile grant payments through a single portal, tapping into the roughly $326 billion sitting in donor-advised fund accounts.
Salomon Serfati
Salomon Serfati is the co-founder and CEO of Chariot, the New York fintech building payment rails for the $326 billion donor-advised fund market. Its flagship product, DAFpay, turned the clunky multi-step process of donating from a DAF into a three-click checkout button now live on over 100,000 nonprofit donation forms, from the American Cancer Society to GoFundMe, and was named one of TIME's Best Inventions of 2025. A University of Pennsylvania computer scientist and former BlackRock engineer who opened a separate 10%-of-income charity account with his first paycheck, Serfati turned a personal tithing habit into financial infrastructure for giving.