Corporate donations platform secures £22m funding

A London tech firm is on track to help employees make £2.4 billion in donations to good causes this year, after it attracted £22 million in venture capital investment.
Goodstack has built a corporate giving platform used by the likes of HSBC, LinkedIn and the design software firm Canva, and has been quietly spending cash raised from San Francisco-based General Catalyst and other investors to achieve its goal.
The business was set up by two university friends, Henry Ludlam, 33, and Stefan Greer, 34, in 2015. It was originally called Percent and initially let retailers reward students for buying goods by sending a small percentage back to their selected campus teams or clubs.
But during the Covid pandemic the friends spotted the opportunity to modernise corporate giving so that employees can easily donate to vetted charities, schools and non-profits around the world. “We have 13 million in our database,” Ludlam said, adding they have all been verified as legitimate.
Goodstack makes its money from selling access to its platform to companies, which usually leaves employee donations free from charges, other than transaction fees charged by card issuers. “As a general rule we try to get the corporates to cover the cost,” he said.
Well-known charitable services such as JustGiving, GoFundMe and Crowdfunder take a percentage fee for providing the service, and also encourage donors to leave them an optional tip.
The charities benefiting from the rapid increase in donations flowing through Goodstack include the Red Cross, Cancer Research, and Oxfam, as well as disaster relief initiatives such as those in the Philippines in response to the tropical cyclone Carina and to the recent floods in Spain. Goodstack facilitated $50,000 of donations in 2020, $1 billion last year and is on track to handle $3 billion this year.
Ludlam said: “There was a massive gap in the market for doing something like us. All the current players were very locally focused. No one had built the one layer [of software] that makes it as easy to give in America as it is in Vietnam, South Africa or Fiji.”
He met Greer in his first year at Manchester University when they shared a flat in Oak House, Fallowfield. They now employ 60 people and retain a “significant minority” shareholding, having raised $33 million in venture capital in total. Nationwide Building Society was an early investor, but has since sold its stake.
General Catalyst first invested in 2021 and has backed other multibillion-pound companies, such as the rentals group Airbnb, the Irish payments business Stripe, and social messaging service Snap, at an early stage of their development.