There are lots of exciting projects in the Nonprofit space and plenty of interesting problems. To accelerate innovation investment into fresh thinking, different approaches and money is required.
Pledgr Fund invests in 2-4 awesome startups a year that serve the Nonprofit sector, generally in the $0.1m to $2m ARR range.
- We prefer Outsiders. People who didn’t attend those schools or work at those companies. We value individuals who have independently earned their success and landed two handfuls of unaffiliated customers.
- We prefer founders from more diverse backgrounds. We prefer founding teams (and to sit around dinner tables for that matter) with significant gender and cultural diversity. We believe this builds stronger unicorns.
- We’re not looking for a high volume of investments. Rather, we aim for a very high success rate of a smaller number of concentrated investments. We make fewer, bigger, better bets.
- We typically don’t invest in pre-revenue companies. We can only invest if you have at least 10 unaffiliated customers, and ideally $10k or more in MRR.
- We will find it challenging to invest if you’ve raised over $1 million, though it’s not impossible.
- We only do B2B (tools for Nonprofits) and only business software, APIs, and tools that enable the building of software. We don’t invest in consumer start-ups.
- We are happy to invest with start-ups based anywhere in the world. And prefer teams that can visit New York City a few times a year. It facilitates easier collaboration, recruitment, fundraising, and partnership opportunities.
How we add value:
- Find, attract and help build your first management team, especially VP of Sales and Marketing.
- Promote your company across the Pledgr ecosystem.
- Find your next round investor for you (assuming you deliver the results). If you hit your numbers, we will get you funded.
- Be your mentor and advisor forever. This is half the fun. Then, the day comes when you know more about this sector than we do, and that’s a good day.
- Be someone you can trust. Sometimes, that may mean the only one to share the truth. But always honestly, and to help you do great things.
What we ask for:
- Integrity + Resilience. We expect tough times. Just don’t hide anything. We can take all the bad news, we can even lose all our money if need be, it’s part of the job. We just ask for honesty and transparency.
- We strongly prefer to invest in more diverse and inclusive teams. If the team isn’t there yet, we ask you commit to getting there.
How to get funded by us:
- Cold emails are welcome! Ideally, include everything you can in the email or LinkedIn message. Attach a deck if you’re OK with that. If your initial message was awesome and we didn’t open it, resend it a second time. Comms channel overload is real.
- We only invest in founders that are part of the Pledgr community. That’s probably you if you got here 😉 But if you’ve never heard of Pledgr, never read a Pledgr post, watched our product discovery videos, or been to one of our events… there are probably better sources of capital.
- We don’t do “get to know you meetings” or coffee meetings before you’re ready to raise. When you’re thinking of raising money, let us know at that point! There aren’t layers of bureaucracy here. We can make an initial decision that week in some cases.
- Get a warm intro from someone is also great – but not at all required. We don’t need warm intros. We invest in Outliers + Outsiders, so we don’t expect you to have that magic little black book yet. But a warm intro from someone awesome we know also works – just please include as much info as you can.
Lastly, if you’re reading this and thinking “should I/shouldn’t I?”… you should. Press send.