Percent, an API-provider allowing firms to customers to donate to good causes, has secured a $5m venture round led by Morpheus Ventures, allowing it to expand in the US, as well as its existing presence in the UK and Australia.
The UK’s Nationwide Building Society – an early investor and customer of the product – was the co-investor in the round, Techcrunch reported.
Founded in 2017, the firm helps firms match a donation made when making a payment, or rounding up a financial transaction. The company’s API-first platform takes care of auditing and compliance processes to prevent fraud and money laundering whilst also parsing tax-efficient disbursements of funds into 200 countries worldwide. It says 7 million non-profit causes have been added to the platform and it’s vetted the potential recipients of donations.
Percent CEO Henry Ludlam said, “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.”
When asked if the pandemic had accelerated the opportunity, Ludlam 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 added that the product could be even built into streaming services. “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.”
Morpheus Ventures MD Kristian Blaszczynski said, “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.”
A Kantar Research says that only 22% of people could name a brand they thought was doing a good job addressing issues such as climate change, plastic waste, and water pollution. On the flip side, 95% of businesses think that “purpose” is at the heart of what they do.
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