Series Seed financing round participants include Aspiration Growth, Bloomberg BETA, 10K Investments, Mission & Market, Wellspring Growth Partners, Godfrey Sullivan, and Frank Year
SAN FRANCISCO, Jun. 11- Bright Funds, the company that enables employee-empowered workplace giving, today announced that the company closed its Series Seed financing round led by Aspiration Growth. The financing will be used to further accelerate the company’s revenue growth through expanded marketing and sales, enhance its enterprise platform features, and build staff in key areas as its customer base scales. Participating in the round were leading venture investors including: Aspiration Growth, Bloomberg BETA, 10K Investments, Wellspring Growth Partners, Mission & Market, Godfrey Sullivan, and Frank Yeary.
Bright Funds provides a Software-as-a Service offering to companies that connects employees to causes they care about and facilitates more impactful workplace giving. Currently serving over 30,000 people at more than 25 companies, the Bright Funds platform enables employees to choose their causes and give to individual non-profits or exclusively available “funds” comprised of multiple nonprofits. In the last 12 months, Bright Funds has experienced more than five times the growth in number of employees served.
Employees can build personalized portfolios of funds that focus on issues such as poverty, education and the environment. For example, an employee may allocate 60% of her portfolio to water and 40% to education, and in a single transaction of any amount, have her contribution evenly allocated among the carefully selected nonprofits in each respective fund. Currently, over 1.5 million nonprofits are accessible through Bright Funds.
The Bright Funds Enterprise platform integrates seamlessly into payroll and HRIS systems, automating countless manual processes including vetting non-profits, managing employee contributions, automating company matching, and issuing payments to charities, as well as organizing and tracking employee volunteering. The service offers powerful features to support high-impact disaster relief and recovery, US-based giving, international giving, and robust reporting, all while enabling employees to track the progress and impact of their charitable giving.
“Bright Funds has already established itself as one of the leaders in an exciting, rapidly growing Software-as-a-Service category,” said Ty Walrod, CEO of Bright Funds. “The financial capital and deep knowledge that our Series Seed investors are providing solidify our opportunity to move enterprises large and small beyond the largely transactional employee giving programs in the marketplace today to a much more rewarding experience for employer and employee alike.”
“I’m proud to support Bright Funds and serve on its board,” said Joseph N. Sanberg, Co-Founder of Aspiration Growth. “The Bright Funds platform is unlocking substantial potential in charitable giving power to companies and their employees, and raising awareness of how businesses can do better by having a positive impact on the world.”
“Bright Funds has an easy to deploy and operationally solid service that employers can trust to implement their employee giving program,” said Michael Coors of 10K investments. “That foundation plus their unique features such as the ability to give to funds comprised of multiple nonprofits drive the greatest opportunity for employee engagement and satisfaction.”
“Today’s employees increasingly value working at companies that care about purpose in addition to profit,” said Frank Yeary. “By eliminating the complexity previously associated with matching gifts, Bright Funds empowers employees to take the kind of mission-driven actions that deliver greater fulfillment and a sense of community within its clients.”
“Bright Funds is the latest evolution in consumerization of the enterprise, addressing a massive market,” said Michael Tedesco of Wellspring Growth Partners. “It’s intuitive, user-centric application will have delighted employees wondering how they managed their charitable giving before Bright Funds.”
“In my corporate career I have witnessed the inefficiencies of traditional donation solutions, and what Bright Funds does is to apply great product sense to drastically simplify the way corporates give, said Stefano Bernardi of Mission and Market. “That’s exactly the type of companies we set out to fund when we launched Mission and Market.”
About Bright Funds
San Francisco-based Bright Funds was founded to help leading companies and their employees change the world through impactful social good programs, and in doing so, make their businesses more successful. Employees, recruits, customers, and investors appreciate companies that use the Bright Funds platform for employee-empowered workplace giving programs. Learn how you can invest in a better world at www.brightfunds.org and follow @brightfunds on Twitter.
