Lightful, a social media fundraising platform, has closed a £4m Series A funding round, with capital coming from Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason and IndyCar champion Dario Franchitti.
The company’s high-profile investor roster spans the world of sport, the arts, business and technology, including renowned entrepreneurs and Lightful board members Jeffrey Thomas and Annika Small, who was awarded an OBE in the new year’s honours list for services to ‘social innovation and digital technology.
By integrating with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, Lightful has created a single, unified platform that enables charities and social enterprises to effectively manage their social media content, supporter relationships and campaigns from a single intuitive dashboard.
Available via desktop, with an app for iOS & Android, Lightful already has 1,800 sign-ups to its service, supporting the increased impact of multiple grassroots charity users.
The company will also be expanding into a full-service digital consultancy called Lightful Services to assist charities in growing their digital presence and complying with regulations, both specific to the sector and related to data protection, such as GDPR and the fundraising regulator. Lightful will also invest the new funds in Lightful Labs, its R&D lab for testing technologies like AI and voice recognition.
Vinay Nair, CEO & co-founder of Lightful, said: “Charities and social enterprises have some of the best stories to tell, and we are excited that Lightful can help grow the potential of using social media for social good – we certainly need that to happen now more than ever.
“That’s why we’re also spearheading a widespread movement to #ReclaimSocial, so that countless examples of positive and high-impact stories can be amplified. With claims that social media is destroying society and acting as a purveyor of hate speech, there’s clearly a significant opportunity to bring about change – and we believe the social impact space has a vital role to play. With the fantastic support from our incredible investors, we’re excited to try to make 2018 the year we can finally reclaim social media – for good.”
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