Lightning pitch: Catapultian – charity innovation platform enroute to unlocking industry worth $905bn

Company: Catapultian – a charity innovation platform that helps businesses identify nonprofits

Headquarters: New York City

Founding team: Josh Kolver and Maxwell Evans

Why we love it: Everyone loves helping charities, it makes us feel good. Funny music man from Australia Tim Minchin even wrote a song about. Catapultian helps charities and small businesses in a very functional way, which basically gets it our seal of approval.

Catapultian recently announced the launch of a new API in order to verify charitable groups. This will help any startup or mid-size tech company run a program that offers discounts to nonprofits and charities – similar to the way that Google, Microsoft, Adobe, and Salesforce do – by letting them very quickly and easily check if the organization is a registered charity.

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In the United States, the nonprofit sector is huge. In 2013 it was valued at $905.9 billion, or 5.4% of U.S. GDP. In total, 1.41 million nonprofits were registered with the IRS in 2013, up 2.8% on 2003. There are 1,293,291 organizations in the U.S. that are eligible to receive tax deductible contributions, just over 227,000 of which have a revenue greater than $500,000. The new API helps the more than one million nonprofits with less revenue quickly get verified by – and then onboard to – large corporations’ charitable discounts.

Companies like Dell, Microsoft, and Adobe are already targeting this vast non-profit sector and now, thanks to Catapultian, so can smaller enterprises.

The platform also serves as a charitable-giving savings account for businesses and individuals so that they can save for good causes and give only when they find something worthwhile. It helps donors to stay within budget, pay with more privacy and with a range of options such as ACH, Bitcoin, or credit card. This is all managed from one central platform that also provides the opportunities for users to research new charities.

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