Deed Announces $2M Fundraise and Launch of Enterprise Business
Following its success as a consumer volunteering app, the social impact platform expands to help brands engage employees and consumers to give back
SAN FRANCISCO, December 17, 2020 (Newswire.com) - Today, social impact platform Deed announced a $2 million seed round and the launch of its SaaS technology for brands. Launch partners include adidas, Stripe and Sweetgreen, among other trailblazing and legacy companies. Led by Paua Ventures along with notable angels including Google Docs inventor Farzad "Fuzzy" Khosrowshahi, the round will be used to continue building the most innovative social impact tools for today’s generation of employees.
Featuring beautifully designed customer giving campaigns, curated volunteering engagements, and cutting-edge analytics to quantify community impact, Deed helps brands harness the passion of their employees and consumers. The mobile-first and design-centric platform has attracted hundreds of thousands of users, operates in 170 countries, and includes a network of over two million nonprofits worldwide. This year, volunteer hours logged through the platform have grown by 300%, while companies have demonstrated a 10x increase in matching giveback programs.
“Now, more than ever, our industry-leading partners recognize the importance of giving back to communities in need,” said Deevee Kashi, co-founder and CEO of Deed. “We are excited to weave our experience in the social impact space into their existing corporate structures to help empower their employees and customers and inspire positive action.”
While Deed’s consumer app continues to lead the way for younger generations to volunteer, the new focus on enterprise partners has allowed the platform to make an even larger impact - especially with regards to the COVID-19 pandemic and racial justice movements across the globe. This summer, Deed helped raise over $1.5 million in only a few short weeks for organizations helping combat racial inequality including the ACLU, Innocence Project, Urban League and more.
Earlier this year, Deed also partnered with former Y Combinator president and current OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to launch HelpWith Black Equity - an open source platform that helps give black businesses, founders, and employees an equal opportunity to succeed. This comes on the heels of the vastly successful HelpWith COVID project that has connected thousands of volunteers with hundreds of projects around the world.
Deed was conceived by Kashi, who, after a 10-year career as a nightlife entrepreneur in NYC, decided to shift his attention to volunteering. The process of becoming a volunteer was cumbersome and inefficient, so Kashi teamed up with co-founders Steve Liu and Aske Ertmann to build the Deed app in 2016. What began as a side project soon became a successful consumer-facing platform, growing organically to a community of over 20,000 New Yorkers in the first few months to hundreds of thousands of users across the globe today.
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Source: Deed