GoFundMe, which shut down its nonprofit arm last year, completed the acquisition of fundraising platform Classy, which will operate as a wholly-owned subsidiary of GoFundMe. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Both companies started in San Diego about 10 years ago. GoFundMe has approximately 400 employees and Classy has 330. The two companies will continue to operate as separate entities under GoFundMe CEO Tim Cadogan. Chris Himes will remain CEO of Classy, reporting to Cadogan.
Classy had raised almost $184 million from investors. After seed and Series A funding rounds from angel investors in 2010 and 2012, respectively, Classy raised about $65.5 million in three subsequent rounds of funding, according to Crunchbase.
Classy counts more than 6,000 nonprofits as customers. Its fundraising suite includes crowdfunding, peer-to-peer fundraising, online donations and event management. Almost 20% of total giving on the platform comes from donors who subscribe to nonprofits and pledge to give on a regular basis.
Classy has a relationship with the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS) and there are some 44,000 leukemia-related campaigns on GoFundMe. “When you think of the number of fundraisers and donors and the extended community that has leveraged GoFundMe just for that cause, for instance, how many of those people does LLS have a relationship with? Are there introductions to be made that both sides would be delighted with? We think so,” Himes told The NonProfit Times when the potential acquisition was announced this past January.
“We weren’t looking to sell the company,” Himes said. “We’d just raised a lot of money and had a clear Plan A for market leadership. The donor acquisition and reach strategy for Classy became too exciting to really postpone. We decided it was a really good time to try to change the space completely,” he said. “One of things that round of funding gave us was the confidence and resources to only do a deal if we were overwhelmed with its attractiveness, especially from a vision perspective.”
GoFundMe launched a free, fundraising suite for nonprofits in 2019, following up on its acquisition of CrowdRise in 2017, before shutting down the platform a year ago. The platform ended support for third-party integrations and the public Application Programming Interface (API) after March 31, 2021. Charities had until this past Dec. 31 to view and export donor and fundraiser data and content from GoFundMe Charity.
GoFundMe also announced Depelsha McGruder joined the GoFundMe board of directors as an independent director. McGruder is currently chief operating officer at the Ford Foundation, a role she has held since 2020, and previously served on Classy’s board of directors.
