Daffy, a financial technology startup started by former Wealthfront CEO Adam Nash, just came out of stealth with its charitable giving platform, according to a press release.
The platform, formerly known as Silverback Ventures, hopes to change the way members think about their charitable donations, allowing users to set aside a pre-determined amount of money for charity each year.
Established as a donor-advised fund (DAF), a tax-deductible financial account for the purpose of charitable giving, Daffy enables whatever amount users choose to be set aside into one of nine tax-free investment portfolios. These portfolios fall into categories including standard, ESG and crypto and can be grown before individual charities can be decided.
The company has raised over $4.8 million in seed funding with investors including Ribbit Capital, XYZ Ventures and Coinbase Ventures.
Co-founders Nash, an Acorns board member and long-time angel investor, and Alejandro Crosa, a software engineer with experience at LinkedIn, Slack and Twitter, show a deep range of tech experience and connections to pull future funding from.
Daffy also allows members to fund these portfolio accounts with linked bank accounts, credit and debit cards through Apple Pay, a list of publicly traded stocks and crypto. The platform’s $3 per-month fee gives users the ability to donate at any time to over 1,500,000 charities, which range from national non-profits to children’s school fundraisers, according to Finextra.
“What we find time and time again is that people want to be generous, they want to help those less fortunate than themselves, but people are busy, and life gets in the way,” Nash stated in the release.
“Alejandro and I spent a lot of time talking with people about their giving practices, the hurdles that interfere with good intentions, and what would make an outstanding, guilt-free giving experience. To that end, we built Daffy to be as flexible or as structured as our members want it to be.”
In other recent fintech news, fraud protection platform Alloy raised a $100M Series C led by Lightspeed Venture Partners to become New York City’s newest unicorn. Teampay also became the first spend management solution in the Microsoft ecosystem, with new Teams integrations.