Author: azeeadmin

Givz, which has developed an API-powered platform that gives brands a way to convert discounts into donations, has raised $3 million in seed funding.

Eniac and Accomplice co-led the financing for the New York-based startup. Additional investors include Supernode Ventures, Claude Wasserstein of Fine Day, Phoenix Club and Dylan Whitman.

Givz was founded in 2017 to make charitable giving more accessible and convenient for the masses. In March 2020, right before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the company pivoted from B2C to B2B and used the technology rails it had built to create the e-commerce marketing platform that Givz is today.

The company aims to drive “full-price purchasing behavior” by giving consumers the ability to convert the money they would be saving if getting a discount, and donating it to their favorite charities. 

Prior to the funding, Givz had been working with more than 80 enterprise, mid-market and SMB retail and e-commerce clients such as H&M, Tom Brady’s TB12, Seedlip and Terez, and accumulated more than 40,000 individual users. Since the shift last year, the company has helped drive more than $1 million to 1,100 charities, according to CEO and founder Andrew Forman.

It just launched on Shopify, which Forman says will give the startup access to the 1.7 million retailers that use Shopify as their e-commerce platform.

Givz operates under the premise that “donation-driven marketing” consistently outperforms discounts and costs less, “making it an attractive addition” to corporate marketing.

“We are creating a new marketing category and generating the largest sustainable charitable giving platform in the process,” he told TechCrunch. 

An example of a company using Givz can be found in Tervis, which offered customers “For every $50 you spend, you’ll receive $15 to give to the charity of your choice.” 

“They used Givz technology to allow consumers to choose the charity of their choice and make a turnkey disbursement to hundreds of charities,” Forman explained. “They saw a 20% lift in website conversion and a 17% increase in average order value as a result of this offer.”

Image Credits: Givz

Currently, Givz has eight employees with plans to more than double that number over the next year.

The company plans to use the new capital toward that hiring, and to do some marketing of its own.

“We also want to explore the full potential around the consumer behavior data we collect,” Forman said.

In the short term, Givz is focused on “Shopify growth” with direct to consumer brands.

“But we have successful use cases and huge potential with enterprise retailers and financial institutions,” Forman told TechCrunch. “In the future, we have our sights set on restaurants, the gaming industry and global expansion. I believe that using personalized donations to incentivize consumer behavior has endless application across industries, verticals and continents.”

Eniac partner Vic Singh said that there’s been a trend of brands experimenting with different ways to target the socially conscious consumer. 

“We believe Givz’s donation-driven marketing platform offers brands the best way to attract the socially conscious consumer while elevating their brand, moving more inventory and driving increased order value rather than simplistic traditional discounting,” he added.

Accomplice’s TJ Mahony said that both he and Singh believed SMS would emerge as a new marketing category, which led to early investments in Attentive and Postscript, respectively.

“We both saw a similar opportunity with Givz,” he wrote via e-mail. “Discounting is a well worn marketing muscle, but it’s detrimental to the brand, margins and customer expectations. We believe continuous impact marketing becomes the alternative to discounting and marketers will begin to build teams and budget around thoughtful and persistent giving strategies.”

Deena Shakir is a partner at Lux Capital, where she looks to invest in technologies that are streamlining analog industries while also improving lives and livelihoods. Among the companies she has backed, for example, are Shiru, which is leveraging computational design to create enhanced proteins to help feed the world; and AllStripes, which aggregates and analyzes medical records, then sells the de-identified data to pharma companies to help them develop medicines.

It’s not a surprise that Shakir is focused on empowering people. Shakir’s father is a psychiatrist and as she once told us, “for a hot minute, I thought I was going to be a doctor myself.” Instead, after attending Harvard, then Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, she wound up working for the State Department during the Obama administration, then headed to Google. She would stay for the next seven years, spending the last of them with GV, Google’s venture unit. There, her work revolved in part around some of the alternative protein companies in GV’s portfolio. Then, in 2019, she was poached by Lux.

Indeed, while Shakir might have once imagined working with people on an individual basis, she has become an increasingly sought-after investor in startup teams, which is why we couldn’t be more excited that she’s able to join us this year for TechCrunch Disrupt. Specifically, we’re thrilled that Shakir will be judging our Startup Battlefield competition, the centerpiece of Disrupt every year and oftentimes a life-changing event for the winning team — and often runners-up, too. Consider that past winners include Vurb, Dropbox, Mint and Yammer, while runner-up Cloudflare currently boasts a market cap of $26 billion.

It’s because we take the competition — and our record to date — so seriously that we’re exceedingly thankful to savvy investors like Shakir, who ask the right questions, and make the tough decisions when it comes time to decide which teams to move along.

Want to watch and judge from home? With our entirely virtual event this year, you’re more than welcome to join us from the comfort of your home or office (and let us know what you think of the startups within the many networking forums you’ll find).

To watch this year’s 20+ startups compete for $100,000 — and to interact with more than 100 hours of content and thousands of enthusiastic startup fans — make sure to book your pass to TC Disrupt, happening September 21-23 — all for less than $100.

Secure your seat today.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted full approval to Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine, making it the first vaccine to achieve that status. The mRNA-based vaccine has been available since late last year through an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA), and will continue to be offered under that designation for those aged 12 to 15 until that separate approval process goes through, but the U.S. drug regulator now recognizes the Pfizer vaccine as fully approved and certified for adults 16 and up.

Part of receiving the approval means that Pfizer and BioNTech can now officially market their vaccine in the U.S., and the FDA revealed it’ll be offered under the trade dress ‘Comirnarty,’ which doesn’t strike me as particularly catchy but at least it’s less of a mouthful than ‘the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.’ FDA approval also means that the vaccine has met all of the administration’s standards for safety and efficacy, including preclinical and clinical trial data, as well as information about tits manufacture, and data gathered from its use during the EUA period.

There’s hope that this new full authorization will encourage fence-sitters who have offered up ‘I’ll wait until it’s fully approved’ as an excuse for not yet having gotten the vaccine despite its availability. At the very least, it’s going to be a lot harder for those hesitating to justify their unreasonable and irresponsible stance in the face of the ongoing pandemic.

Comirnarty got flagged for ‘Priority Review’ by the FDA, which essentially means that the administration devoted its full attention to the process in order to expedite it. No word yet on a timeline for Moderna’s approval, but it’s also in the priority review queue.

We’ll be talking to BioNTech CEO and co-founder Uğur Şahin at TC Disrupt 2021 this year, so be sure to check out that virtual event coming up September 21-23.