Rebuilding the Infrastructure of Fundraising
The U.S. philanthropic ecosystem processes hundreds of billions of dollars annually across education, healthcare, and community foundations.
Every college, hospital, nonprofit, and foundation raises money.
Fundraising is not a niche vertical. It is a horizontal function embedded in nearly every mission-driven institution.
The opportunity is not to win a small category.
It is to modernize a universal workflow.
Legacy systems like Blackbaud Raiser's Edge were built for record-keeping in a pre-AI era.
They assume:
Fundraising teams remain workflow-bound and labor-limited because the software reinforces that constraint.
We believe AI removes the labor ceiling.
There is no fixed ceiling on generosity.
Only constraints imposed by tooling.
Primary incumbent: Blackbaud Raiser's Edge.
They dominate through inertia, procurement friction, and contract lock-in — not product innovation.
Innovation is slow because incentives reward predictability and margin preservation.
We are not building incremental features on top of legacy architecture.
We are replacing the operating model.
Switching costs have historically protected incumbents.
We remove that barrier entirely.
The friction to try us approaches zero.
While customers remain under legacy contracts:
This aligns incentives and removes procurement resistance.
We make money only when they raise money.
When legacy contracts expire:
This creates a low-friction entry and a high-retention conversion.
Revenue layers in three stages:
Over time, ARPU expands as automation becomes central to operations.
Education first.
Community colleges are uniquely positioned at the intersection of workforce retraining and the future labor market.
From there:
We begin by replacing donor management.
We expand into:
As depth increases, GradRoots becomes infrastructure — not software.
Legacy systems defend contracts.
We build operational leverage.
If we materially lower cost per dollar raised, fundraising capacity expands.
When that becomes systemic, the social safety net becomes stronger without additional legislation.
That is the strategic leverage behind the market.