Our journey to philanthropic payments began with a spreadsheet
Chariot started with a personal goal to contribute 10% of our income to Charity annually. A small group of friends who all shared this goal were seeking something better than a spreadsheet to track our giving & hold ourselves accountable. Managing a spreadsheet was tedious, error-prone and time consuming.
How could we better organize our giving and spread the practice of goal-driven philanthropy to more people?
In the summer of 2021, we put an idea out there on Facebook about a “new” structure - a separate financial account for your charitable dollars.
As we encouraged more people to adopt this structure, we saw some amazing behavior changes:
- Participants saw giving as more of an investment than an expense. When asked to make a donation, they thought about allocating their charity budget instead of evaluating a one-time cost to donate.
- They focused more on the opportunity for impact and alignment with an organization’s mission instead of the cost.
- They started proactively asking “where should I give?” instead of only giving when asked.
And the key was our initial goal was being realized - people were more generous - making larger gifts to more organizations more often.
“Discovering” Donor Advised Funds
As we spread the good word about charitable savings accounts, we quickly learned about Donor Advised Funds or DAFs.
DAFs were exactly what we were looking for - but in many ways, even better! They are financial accounts for charitable giving, but they also have tax advantages and your balance can be invested to grow over time.
We’re not ones to reinvent the wheel, and so we encouraged our group of 10% givers to close their debit accounts and open up DAFs instead. They could easily set up no-minimum DAF accounts with financial firms like Fidelity and Schwab, or tech companies like Charityvest, Daffy and Groundswell.
But just as soon as we made the switch, we started getting the same feedback over and over: “DAFs are a great idea, but in practice we can’t actually use them anywhere!” In all the instances where people were most inspired to give - a school’s giving day, a friend’s marathon fundraiser or a cousin’s GoFundMe campaign - there was no way to pay with their DAF online. We couldn’t believe it - their DAF was the one account specifically set up for charitable giving and they couldn’t use it on any donation form!
As we investigated further, we also learned about the frustrations that nonprofits have with DAFs. They are actively looking to raise more from DAF accounts and get more information on their DAF donors sooner.
While the $326 billion DAF market has been expanding exponentially, +20% on average per year over the past 5 years, we knew that it could be even larger and more impactful if DAFs were able to be used everywhere people donate.
Chariot was born as a simple solution
We soon aligned on a mission to accelerate philanthropy with a modern payment network purpose-built for the nonprofit sector. We knew that an embedded DAF payment option could solve both the donor and nonprofit pain points, while helping to increase adoption of DAFs.
We were accepted into Y-Combinator and fine-tuned the easy DAF payment solution that would be a total game changer for nonprofits, donors and DAF providers.
We quickly began to appreciate just how profound the implications of this solution could be:
- DAFs could be used across the internet, allowing DAF donors and nonprofits to more closely connect.
- DAF donors could use their DAFs more frequently, making DAFs their primary charitable wallet.
- More donors would learn about DAFs, increasing their usage and adoption around the world, promoting the same behavior changes we saw when we proposed our first new charitable wallet structure with our friends - namely that people gave more to charity, more intentionally.
Hitting Major Milestones
By early 2023, we were able to take our first product, DAFpay live with our first nonprofit partners and fundraising platforms. Over the course of the next year, we proved:
- DAF donors were not only willing to use this new method of giving, they loved being able to give at the exact moment and location of inspiration.
- An easy, embedded DAF giving option improves fundraising outcomes and donor engagement for nonprofits - see just a few examples in our latest case studies.
But as DAFpay grew, we uncovered something deeper: getting more DAF dollars initiated online is only half the battle. The deeper, more persistent problem is what happens after a gift is initiated, how charitable dollars are actually sent, received, identified, and reconciled across a fragmented ecosystem of grantmakers (DAFs, foundations, corporate giving platforms, QCDs, crowdfunding platforms) to the 1.4 million nonprofits.
That insight is what led us to expand Chariot beyond a single payment option into two purpose-built product lines rooted in the same network:
Chariot for Grantmakers helps DAFs, foundations, and other grantmaking institutions send payments more efficiently and securely by giving them a modern solution for routing funds to nonprofits:
- Grantmakers can use Chariot to find verified nonprofit payment details to send digital payments and checks in one place.
- This reduces operational burden, timing delays, and fraud exposure — while improving the recipient nonprofit’s experience by making grant details easier to identify and reconcile.
Chariot for Nonprofits helps organizations raise more from DAFs and save time processing gifts that come outside of their donation form: process charitable donations with less operational burden:
- Include DAFpay on donation forms so donors can give from their DAF in seconds at the moment of inspiration.
- Receive charitable payments and data from grantmakers in a more unified way - getting fast funds with less manual reconciliation across dozens of portals and paper check-based workflows.
The goal: fewer checks, fewer portals, fewer manual steps - and more funds arriving faster with clearer information.
By end of 2025, we had achieved even more substantial milestones:
- Recognized for innovation: Fast Company named Chariot one of its Most Innovative Companies, and TIME named DAFpay one of the Best Inventions of 2025.
- Proven at scale: We work with tens of thousands of nonprofits, moving hundreds of millions of dollars, including many of the largest and best-known organizations in the country.
- Built with nonprofits at the center: Several of these partners joined our Nonprofit Advisory Council, helping ensure the nonprofit experience stayed central as we expanded Chariot’s products and solutions.
These have been exciting advancements for our team & community to achieve, but it is only the beginning.
The future with Chariot
We have 2 main goals we are relentlessly focused on:
- Making giving with a DAF easier than giving with a credit card, anywhere a donor is inspired to give.
- Building a unified charitable payments network - so grantmakers can send funds seamlessly and nonprofits can receive them effortlessly, with the right data.
There are 70 million 401k accounts in the US, but less than 1 million DAF accounts. This is despite the fact that 7 in every 10 Americans donate to charity. We envision a future where Americans’ primary charitable wallet is their Donor Advised Fund, but that will require DAFs to be usable in any location where a donor can donate.
Getting closer to these goals would not be possible without the incredible collaboration of thousands of stakeholders in our ecosystem. Luckily, we share a common mission with donors, nonprofits, fundraising platforms and DAFs - we all want to increase high impact philanthropy. We know Chariot can play a leading role in building the financial infrastructure that will make this future possible.
We are also proud to have joined forces with a powerful list of leading investors - including Maveron, Spark Capital, SV Angel & Y-Combinator - who are as excited by our mission to accelerate philanthropy as we are.
We couldn’t do any of this without the collaboration of our tens of thousands of nonprofit partners doing the hard work on the ground that inspires us every day. We know our world needs philanthropy now more than ever, and Chariot is working hard to drive new records of giving and impact.
