NEA, Freelance Lead $5 Million Seed Funding Round for Change

Ann Bordetsky

New Enterprise Associates and Freestyle Capital on Tuesday jointly led a $5 million seed funding round for Change, a San Francisco-based startup that builds technology to make giving easier. Other investors included Shrug Capital and angel investors from Solana, Alchemy and Dapper Labs.

In 2020, Change raised $750,000 in a pre-seed round led by former NEA general partner Kittu Kolluri’s Neotribe Ventures.

Change, co-founded by Northwestern University alumni Sonia Nigam and Amar Shah, has only one employee, besides its founders. With the new funding, it plans to hire three engineers to build a new platform to enable donation of cryptocurrency, adding to its system for fiat currency.

“We’re really focusing on buckling down and enabling all the tracking and management tools that we have for the traditional brands, and bringing [them] to the cryptocurrency space,” Nigam told TechCrunch after the recent funding round.

Porsche, Make-A-Wish America among partners

The startup connects individual and corporate donors with philanthropies, and enables donations to be made from varied platforms, and checkout points on websites and in real-world locations. Change has developed application programming interfaces (APIs) that makes donation a breeze, charging 1.5% of the transacted amount for the service. It has also launched point-of-sale campaigns, charitable non fungible tokens (NFTs) and loyalty programs.

Luxury carmaker Porsche, NFT producer Metaplex, retailer Lokai and Girls Who Code are among Change’s partners, as are charities such as Make-A-Wish America and New York-based Welcome to Chinatown.

Crypto community as better givers

Besides Northwestern, where Nigam received an undergrad degree in computer science and business, she has studied business administration at the London School of Economics. She served as a software engineer at online payments firm Braintree, and later worked at Alan AI, a developer of voice assistants.

Nigam and Shah are betting that the crypto community will be a bigger giver, citing a surge in demand from decentralized finance apps and web3 companies interested in enabling charitable giving.The duo has also started a donor foundation that helps companies identify charitable groups to donate to, besides offering broader advice on giving.

Bordetsky oversaw Change investment

NEA’s investment in Change was led by partner Ann Bordetsky, a former Uber and Twitter executive. She joined NEA in 2021 and over sees investments in consumer and enterprise technologies, with a focus on the future of work, commerce and platforms.

Bordetsky has led NEA’s investments in Contra, which runs a professional community platform for independent workers; Glacier, which fights climate change by building cutting-edge AI and robotic solutions for the recycling industry; and Spokn, a podcasting platform for enterprises.

Prior to NEA, Bordetsky served as chief operating officer of Rival, Inc., an enterprise platform for live event commerce that was acquired by Live Nation/Ticketmaster in 2020. At Uber, Bordetsky was director of Business Development & Strategic initiatives, leading growth initiatives, strategic partnerships and new vertical formation. Prior to Uber, she headed Twitter’s Commerce and Consumer Product Business Development unit.

Bordetsky has also held go-to-market (GTM) roles at early-stage marketplace and mobility startups— Wheelz and Better Place. Early in her career, Bordetsky held government engagement and federal policy roles in Washington, D.C. at one of the nation’s top environmental think tanks.

Bordetsky received an MBA from Stanford University and a bachelor’s degree in environmental science, policy and management from the University of California, Berkeley.

NEA floated 2 funds in 2022

NEA has raised over $5 billion this year via two funds, adding to a dozen others in previous years, according to a report in Axios on May 25. One focusing on early-stage ventures, called New Enterprise Associates 18, raised $2.8 billion from SD Ventures and Cathay Life Insurance in May. It is just shy of the targeted $2.9 billion.The second fund eyeing growth-stage companies has raised $2.3 billion, or about 62% of the targeted $3.7 billion.

The venture firm has not confirmed the Axios report on two funds this year. In a release on March 11, it only said that “it has closed on $3.6 billion for its latest fund, bringing the firm’s committed capital to nearly $24 billion over its 42-year history.” The new fund is NEA’s largest to date and will be invested across a broad range of technology and healthcare sectors, it added.