The last decade is filled with examples of fintechs that have reshaped how U.S. businesses manage money. Brex simplified corporate cards. Ramp automated spend controls. Mercury rebuilt startup banking. But this wave of financial innovation has largely skipped one major part of the economy: nonprofits.
Givefront, a YC-backed startup founded by 21-year-old Harvard dropout Matt Tengtrakool and UC Berkeley’s Aidan Sunbury, aims to change that. The company is building a financial platform designed specifically for nonprofits, including food banks, animal rescues, non-governmental organizations, churches, and homeowner associations.
Nonprofits generate roughly 6% of the U.S. GDP and contribute trillions of dollars each year, yet most still rely on outdated financial tools. Givefront believes that modern spend management, compliance, and reporting infrastructure — tailored to nonprofit realities — can unlock significant efficiency gains across the sector.
Before starting Givefront, Tengtrakool experimented with a microloan aggregation startup in Nigeria. He later worked inside several nonprofits while studying computer science and statistics at Harvard, including running a few organizations himself. At one nonprofit, he helped grow donations to nearly $500,000. Tengtrakool says these experiences revealed a clear gap that nonprofits face. They have strict regulatory and reporting requirements but lack the tools that modern businesses take for granted.
“I’ve always been interested in financial systems, and this work fits naturally with that,” the chief executive told 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 initially built the first version of Givefront to solve those problems internally. What started as tooling for organizations he worked with soon expanded to local nonprofits across the country. Over time, the team narrowed its focus to a unified financial platform built exclusively for registered nonprofit organizations, about 1.9 million of them in the U.S.
Givefront entered Y Combinator Winter 2024 with a broad vision spanning banking and accounting. The team quickly learned, however, that convincing nonprofits to replace accountants or core banking relationships required a slow and painful sales process, ushering a pivot to cards and spend management.
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“It’s much easier to get an organization to switch the card they use than to replace their entire accounting stack,” Tengtrakool said.
Although Givefront offers features similar to corporate spend platforms like Ramp and Brex, its exclusive focus on nonprofits sets it apart.
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