Percent is making it easier and convenient for people to be able to donate to good causes. Founded in 2017, its API works by allowing people and even firms, companies, and businesses to make donations to good causes.
Percent has closed a $5M venture round led by Morpheus Ventures and is now planning to expand to the US, as well as strengthen its existing presence in the UK and Australia. The UK’s Nationwide Building Society – also an early investor and customer of the product – also participated in the round.
The platform takes care of auditing and compliance processes to prevent fraud and money-laundering and also parses tax-efficient disbursements of funds into 200 countries worldwide through its API, the company said. According to the company, 7 million non-profit causes have been added to the platform and it’s vetted the potential recipients of donations.
“Percent was founded to become the global API-first infrastructure behind all giving. This will be the foundation for a better, fairer future of capitalism in which every financial transaction has social and environmental good built into it”, Henry Ludlam, Founder, and CEO of Percent said.
“Because of COVID, suddenly now we have brands that are really desperate to build purpose into their business in a way that they just weren’t doing 18 months ago. It’s really been an amazing shift. We’ve just seen a huge shift in what consumers expect from businesses. Consumers expect businesses to build purpose into what they do now”, he said in an interview with Techcrunch.
Explaining how the platform can be utilized by virtually anyone, he said that “say you’ve seen a documentary. And at the end of the documentary, you feel particularly moved, like you watched a David Attenborough or something like that. You could then actually be able to quickly and easily build donations into the end of it. So using our API, it would pull up a list of nonprofits, so right there and then the customer could make a donation. We’re also working with a crypto platform where you can round down your transactions and donate to any nonprofit as well. There’s loads of really cool stuff we are working on which is coming out soon.”
Kristian Blaszczynski, the Managing Partner of Morpheus Ventures, also mentioned that “With the events of the last several years, it has become more apparent that aligning brands with purpose is driving consumer behavior and spend. However, today, the process of donating to non-profits is incredibly archaic, manual, and inefficient… Percent’s API-first platform abstracts away all of these complexities and automates the processes, allowing businesses to align closer to their stakeholders and focus on their core business.”
With the way it has been designed and is going, Percent is on its way to becoming the Stripe of donations.
