Somewhere between finishing a doctoral dissertation on cognitive neuroscience and staring at spreadsheets full of nonprofit donor data, Tim Paris noticed something obvious that nobody in the sector had acted on: charities were sitting on years of donor behavioral data and doing almost nothing intelligent with it.
The same statistical techniques Paris had used to analyze brain signals at Western Sydney University - pattern recognition, propensity modeling, predictive scoring - were sitting unused in a sector that desperately needed them. Nonprofits were segmenting donor lists by hand, relying on gut instinct, and watching lapsed donors quietly disappear without ever knowing it was coming.
Set a new standard in charitable fundraising, using AI and BI to ensure every nonprofit can make a bigger impact in the world.
- Tim Paris, Dataro Mission StatementIn 2017, Paris co-founded Dataro with his high school friend David Lyndon. The combination was unusual on purpose: a neuroscientist and a software engineer, with no prior experience in the nonprofit sector, deciding they could rebuild how charities find and keep donors. A year later, technology lawyer Chris Paver joined as COO, completing a founding team that looked nothing like a typical fundraising consultancy.
The bet was simple but radical. Nonprofits - even small ones - have more donor data than they know what to do with. CRMs full of giving histories, event attendance, campaign responses, upgrade patterns. Dataro's machine learning models would read that data and surface predictions: who is likely to give a one-time gift this month, who is at risk of lapsing, who is ready to become a monthly sustainer, who might have major gift potential. Not guesses. Probabilities, updated daily, surfaced in the tools fundraisers already use.
The platform now runs six distinct ML prediction models. Fundraisers see propensity scores for one-time giving, recurring giving, mid-level upgrading, major giving, planned giving, and lapse risk - all in a single dashboard that plugs into the CRM already in use. Campaigns are no longer sent to "everyone on the list." They're sent to the people most likely to respond.
By the time Dataro's $14.28M Series A closed in February 2026 - led by Blueprint Equity, with existing investors Basis Set Ventures and Save the Children participating - the platform was serving more than 300 organizations across the US, UK, Australia, and New Zealand. The client list reads like a who's who of serious nonprofit operations: World Central Kitchen, Stand Up To Cancer, Amnesty International. These aren't early adopters experimenting with AI. They're organizations with real donor bases making real commitments to data-driven fundraising.