Over the past ten years, fintech startups have transformed how American businesses handle their finances. Yet much of this progress has focused on for-profit companies, leaving nonprofits to navigate outdated financial tools that were never built with their needs in mind.
Givefront is stepping into that gap. Backed by Y Combinator, the startup was founded by 21-year-old Harvard dropout Matt Tengtrakool alongside Aidan Sunbury of UC Berkeley. Its mission is to create a financial platform tailored specifically for nonprofits, from food banks and animal shelters to NGOs, churches, and homeowner associations.
Nonprofits account for about 6% of the U.S. economy and move trillions of dollars annually, but many are still stuck using clunky, outdated financial systems. Givefront’s bet is that bringing modern tools for spend management, compliance, and reporting, built specifically around how nonprofits actually operate, can dramatically improve efficiency across the sector.
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Before launching Givefront, Tengtrakool tested the waters with a microloan aggregation startup in Nigeria. He then spent time working within multiple nonprofits while studying computer science and statistics at Harvard, even running a few of them himself. At one organization, he helped scale fundraising to almost $500,000. Those experiences, he says, made one problem impossible to ignore: nonprofits are held to tight regulatory and reporting standards, yet they are still operating without the kind of modern financial tools that for-profit companies now see as basic.
“I’ve always been interested in financial systems, and this work fits naturally with that,” as the chief executive shared with TechCrunch. “While helping run these nonprofits with a few other students, we realized most of them didn’t have adequate financial tools to ensure compliance or protect their tax-exempt status. The tools they relied on were completely out of sync with what’s considered modern in the startup world.”
Tengtrakool originally built the first version of Givefront as an in-house fix to those challenges. What began as a solution for the nonprofits he was directly involved with quickly found interest from local organizations across the U.S. As the product evolved, the team sharpened its focus on creating a single, integrated financial platform designed solely for registered nonprofits, a market that includes roughly 1.9 million organizations nationwide.
While Givefront may look, at first glance, like corporate spend tools such as Ramp or Brex, its nonprofit-only approach is what truly differentiates it.
Nonprofits operate within limits that most businesses never encounter. They juggle restricted and unrestricted funding, report spending back to donors and foundations, track volunteer reimbursements, and comply with IRS Form 990 requirements. Many are managing dozens of grants at the same time, each with its own rules on how money can be spent and reported.
Older nonprofit software platforms like Blackbaud, Sage, and MIP still dominate the space, but they often fall short when it comes to real-time spending controls, intuitive approval flows, and smooth integrations with the tools nonprofits now rely on.
Givefront is not trying to rip and replace those systems. Instead, it positions itself as a specialized layer that works alongside them. The platform plugs into existing accounting software and adds features nonprofits actually need, including grant-level budgeting, audit-ready receipt capture, nonprofit-specific spend controls, and automated reporting.
“Many of the workflows we’re building are deeply specific to how this part of the economy works,” Tengtrakool shared. “Our workflows and integrations are a 10x improvement when compared to traditional corporate or spend management tools.”
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Givefront currently makes money through card interchange fees and subscription charges linked to its bill pay offering. Looking ahead, the startup plans to widen its revenue base by rolling out related products such as payroll, banking, budgeting tools, and eventually even investment or endowment management.
About six months after introducing its cards, Givefront has already brought hundreds of nonprofits onto the platform. The company says both revenue and total payment volume are growing at more than 200% month over month. By the end of this year, Givefront expects to be working with around 1,000 nonprofits, and it is aiming to scale that number to roughly 5,000 organizations by the middle of next year.
The startup recently raised $2 million in a funding round led by Script Capital, with backing from Y Combinator, C3 Ventures, and Phoenix Fund, along with angel investors that include the CEOs of Chariot and Wealthfront. The fresh capital will be used to expand distribution, build out the team, and further develop its card and bill pay products.