Premoney 49: Outdefine & Open Grants
Better access to grant funding...and engineering talent.
Welcome to week 49! We have a global audience here, and I deeply hope that everyone reading this is safe and in good spirits.
My first investment of 2022
As I mentioned in my first post of 2022, I have a goal of investing in 10 featured Premoney companies this year. Very excited to put my money where my mouth is (seemed like an apropos saying) with Chek, as the first of those investments.
I featured Chek on Premoney 46, and was extremely impressed by the amount of traction they made in short period of time, within a very niche and largely hard to break into industry.
Chek enables organizations to modernize the “distribution of funds through physical and virtual smart debit cards.” Like me, you probably thought “ah! Like Ramp or Brex!” Yes & no. Similar mediums, but different focus areas. Chek focuses on organizations like charities, sports organizations, universities & campaigns, where “assurance” is the most important thing. These org-types are typically extremely hard to sell into & look to each other to see what tools the rest of the industry are using. Once a tool has an industry stamp of approval, others more quickly adopt it.=
So, while Ramp & Brex focus much of their efforts on expense management, Chek focuses on helping organizations like those mentioned, to ensure that money is spent correctly and that they have the data to show it. Charities, for example, live & die on the ability to showcase impact from donations and the transparency to prove that donations were spent appropriately. Many charities rely on incomplete data & cumbersome processes to tell these stories.
Chek has already sold into multiple charities & other institutions, and is on the path to providing assurance solutions to dozens more this year. They enable those organizations to seamlessly map donations back to impact & visualize (and control!) how money is spent. More transparency leads to more impact, and a fruitful cycle when raising funds. So - not only is this business solving a real need, it’s enabling high-impact organizations to have…more impact.
Numbers! Two months ago, Chek had ~11.5k cardholders and processed ~$3.5M total through their platform. They now have over 25k cardholders and processed $1.1M in February alone. Ayo!
I’m incredibly excited to join Nick & Chris on their journey, and would love to make an introduction to anyone interested - for that, please reply to this note directly.
This weeks companies:
Company: OpenGrants
Founder: Sedale Turbovsky
Raise Details: We are currently raising $1M on a SAFE ($500k committed).
Vertical: Fintech
Business Model: B2B,SaaS,Marketpalce
1-Liner: OpenGrants is the easy way to win grant funding.
Description: OpenGrants is deploying modern financial infrastructure to support efficient, equitable, and transparent grant funding processes for the world's most important work. Grants have the highest risk profile of any capital, they are non-dilutive, require no repayment and desired outcomes are typically impact focused. While many grant programs exist, most have become victims of bureaucratic bloat and private interest issues. OpenGrants makes grant funding equitable, efficient and accessible.
Traction Indicators:
💰 $189K 2021 Revenue (170% revenue growth YoY)
35% user growth month-over-month
Zero paid marketing
Net Promoter Score is 80 and trending up
Company: Outdefine
Founder: Romil Verma & Sanjay Verma
Raise Details: Raising $3M seed for building and launching the token.
Vertical: Future of Work, Crypto
Business Model: Marketplace
1-Liner: Outdefine is a vetted talent marketplace for engineers built on a crypto token
Description: Outdefine provides engineers access to global jobs, managed payroll and benefits, and crypto token rewards for work. Companies get a unified solution to hire and manage vetted engineers. Outdefine is founded by Romil (CEO) and Sanjay (COO). Romil is a 2x founder who comes from Google, Stanford. He previously co-founded a startup that raised $10M in funding. Sanjay built a $2.5B IT company as a core member and has held executive roles at large corporations.
Traction Indicators:
$400,000 in GMV
$20,000 in MRR
Over 2,100 engineers on the platform
That’s all for this week!
Jake