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This afternoon, somewhere in the United States, a hungry child won’t get fed. Somebody in the world—many somebodys, in fact—will get diagnosed with breast cancer. An entire community in Chad will go another day without clean drinking water.
These are horrible situations, but they do not go unnoticed. No Kid Hungry, for instance, works to make sure no child in America goes without food. Susan G. Komen is on a mission to end breast cancer. charity: water is bringing clean and safe water to every person on the planet. The world has more problems than it can solve, more problems than our governments and markets can take care of on their own. But through human compassion and charitable giving, nonprofits aim to tackle many of the world’s most difficult problems.
So here is perhaps the least controversial statement ever written: the world would be a better place if nonprofits (1) raised a lot more money and (2) were a lot more effective.
Why? Fewer kids would go hungry. More support would go towards breast cancer research, community health, and public policy. More people would have easy access to clean drinking water. Thousands of other great outcomes to improve human well-being would happen all over the planet.
Here is the more difficult question: how do we make this world a reality?
If you were tasked with accomplishing that goal (nonprofits raising more money and being more effective), how would you go about it? What would be your first step? Well, if you are anything like Chariot founders Aaron Kahane, Salo Serfati, and Drew Schneider, you might spend years investigating this question. And when you do, you might quickly realize there is one major unsolved problem sitting at the center of all of this: financial infrastructure.
The financial rails available to nonprofits (handling things like donations, disbursements, gift processing, and more) are traditionally a mess. Clean up this mess and you not only help nonprofits raise more money and become more effective, you put yourself at the center of the entire industry to help determine what’s next. This is, more or less, what Chariot is doing.
So I wanted to learn more about Chariot. What does their product do today? Why? What’s the long-term vision? What is it like to work there? And who should consider joining their (intentionally) small and efficient team? Answers to those questions, and more, below.
The product
Charitable giving is about 3% of US GDP. That’s a lot of money. So you might be surprised to learn that the financial infrastructure that underlies it feels ripped straight out of the early 2000s.
Chariot focuses on Donor-Advised Funds (DAFs). Created in the 1930s and popularized over the past five years or so, the basic idea is that you contribute money or stock, get the tax deduction right away, and then decide later which nonprofits actually receive the money. The funds grow tax-free in the meantime.
DAFs are already a big deal: $326B was committed to giving in these funds as of 2024. But it’s still early days. Only 17% of Americans even know what a DAF is, and 401(k) accounts outnumber DAFs by a factor of 20, even though more Americans give to charity than save for retirement. The ceiling for DAFs feels much higher than where things stand today.
Okay, say you want to actually make a payment via your DAF. How would you do that?
Before Chariot, the answer was: with a lot of friction. You see a nonprofit you want to support, but there’s no option to use your DAF in the payment flow. Instead, you leave the nonprofit’s site, log into your DAF portal, search for the nonprofit’s legal name and EIN, enter the amount, specify the campaign (if you still remember it), and submit a request. Then someone writes a paper check and lumps your gift with hundreds of others. The nonprofit eventually receives the money with or information about you besides maybe your DAF’s name, if they’re lucky.
This is kind of insane, right? Business does not still happen this way in almost any other part of the economy. And this friction can probably explain a lot of why so many people end up ignoring their DAFs; it likely costs nonprofits billions every year. “Philanthropic infrastructure is inherently extremely high impact… But they’re stuck dealing with terrible financial technology and backwards processes,” Elon Packin, Chariot’s Head of Partnerships, told me.
To fix this, Chariot created an Apple Pay-like solution called DAFpay. It’s the industry’s first and only DAF payment checkout option that lets you donate from your DAF, directly on the nonprofit’s donation page. It’s already helping thousands of nonprofits (like No Kid Hungry, Susan G. Komen, and Charity: water) raise more money and get more details about their donor so they can steward them better. (DAFpay was one of TIME’s Best Inventions of 2025, right alongside Claude Sonnet and the Waymo Driver.)
But the story doesn’t end here. Beyond individual DAF donations, nonprofits can receive DAF gifts from over a thousand different grantmakers and workplace giving platforms (like employer corporate match programs). And each grantmaker or platform has their own login portal and way of transferring funds and data to the nonprofit, which creates an operational nightmare for already under-resourced nonprofit teams. (Some nonprofits have 20 to 30 people on their team whose job is to reconcile, code, and move these gifts into their CRM and accounting systems.)
To solve this, Chariot introduced its two other core products:
Disbursements: Helps grantmakers, e.g. DAF sponsors, including community foundations and workplace giving platforms, facilitate electronic payments to over 1.4M+ nonprofits safely and securely.
Gift Processing: Helps nonprofits unify payment sources, enrich their donation data, and sync with their CRM and accounting platforms.
Each of these products attacks a different broken piece of the same underlying rails: how donors pay, how grantmakers pay, and how nonprofits make sense of what arrives. And each of them sets the foundation for Chariot to live at the center of all nonprofit finance.
I want to stress that this suite of products actually means something, actually does something, in the real world. “Financial infrastructure” can sound abstract, but the outcomes here aren’t.
You could look at the Michael J. Fox Foundation, which funds research toward a cure for Parkinson’s. After installing DAFpay, average digital gifts came in 9x larger than typical credit card donations ($1,800 vs. $204) and 69% of DAFpay users were first-time donors entirely. You could look at the Pan-Mass Challenge, a bike-a-thon that has raised more than $1B for cancer research since 1980. Nearly half of their 2024 fundraising growth came through DAFpay alone.
Chariot is unlocking better fundraising for many of the world’s most impactful nonprofits. And they are, by doing so, making the world a materially better place.
The strategy
Back to the big mission: how do we create a world where nonprofits raise more money and are more effective? How do we create a world where philanthropy is 10% of the global GDP—a goal Chariot states in their employee handbook?
The first step is to build a new set of financial rails that make it faster and more secure to send and receive nonprofit payments.
The second step, of course, is to win. In twenty years, Chariot will be “the default financial infrastructure layer for the entire nonprofit economy,” Aaron Kahane, co-founder and COO, said. “[AI] agents will handle most operational and software work. In that world, Chariot powers the primitives and trust layer - identity, compliance, and money movement - that agents, platforms, and institutions rely on to move money to nonprofits.”
How does this happen? Well, one reason is that Chariot has also started by solving the hardest-to-replicate problems first. “Our stack gets more defensible over time, not less,” Aaron said. “Most startups in this space focus on UX, dashboards, integrations… those layers get commoditized. We’re focused on what doesn’t: nonprofit identity, compliance, and money movement. Establishing and maintaining financial accounts tied to nonprofit identity requires deep compliance (KYC, AML) and institutional trust. That’s slow, operationally heavy, and not something a new entrant, or an agent, can spin up quickly. We already have 38% of the total nonprofit space (by contributions) banked in this network.”
There is a strong network effect here, too. “People all like to talk about network effects, I’ve put it into a ton of pitch decks in the past,” Mitch Stein, Head of Strategy, said. “The power of our network effects are palpable… Because we’re bridging pieces of the ecosystem, we have grantmakers paying a nonprofit through Chariot, which brings the nonprofit to us. We have nonprofits directing their payments to their Chariot account where they can automate the processing & reconciliation. We have donation forms adding Chariot payment options at the checkout, bringing their nonprofit clients in… I’ve really never felt it like this before.”
And there’s another more obvious reason, the same reason you probably haven’t heard about many Chariot-like companies: this is a very underserved space. Y Combinator’s next batch isn’t going to feature 30 new nonprofit finance startups. And since Chariot started with the difficult-to-replicate infrastructure problems and is already entrenched with a huge portion of the market… You’d have a long road ahead if you really wanted to compete.
The growth
The strategy is working. “We are growing 2-5% of the TOTAL NONPROFIT SPACE each month,” co-founder Aaron said of Chariot’s banked network. Chariot has moved over $450M in total to nonprofits, and they moved $150M this past April alone. (To put that into context, Chariot’s first $10M month was only 8 months ago.)
Early sales were founder-led (“warm intros, quick pitches,” Salomon Serfati said). But, in part due to the network effects I described earlier, things are shifting to product-led growth. “Our customers are finding the next set of customers.”
If you look at Chariot’s fundraising history, you’ll see that it is much like their product: purpose-built and intentional. Chariot went through Y Combinator in the summer of 2022 and raised an $11M Series A led by Maveron in 2024. They count a huge portion of the nonprofit industry as customers already. They are growing fast. Revenue is up 11X since that Series A. Today, the company is growing its customer base about 30X YoY.
Chariot has been intentional about fundraising, has built a phenomenal product, and is growing faster than ever in a market they hope to one day be the default financial layer for.
The team and culture
Chariot speaks more about its culture than most startups. Co-founder Aaron runs a Substack where he has written about how to get stuff done, why slow speaking is overrated, and why good references are better than a resume. Their employee handbook, which is public (you can read it here) and covers the way they work, gives more detail than a million years’ worth of generic career pages possibly could. I read all of those things—and talked to their team directly—to learn more about how they operate.
One of the first things that stood out to me is how much Chariot cares about speed. Of course every startup says they like to ship fast. But Chariot has clearly thought about this and has a few thoughts about what speed means and how to do it:
Speed matters a lot. There’s an expectation that you reply to everything in <1 day.
Speed and quality are not mutually exclusive. You can, and should, do both!
Speed doesn’t mean being lazy. It also doesn’t mean “AI slop,” their handbook says.
This kind of quality-focused urgency was echoed by the people I talked to. “Chariot is a culture where you really need to own your workstreams and drive them forward. You need to be passionate about the mission in order to have the hunger to push the pace on hitting your goals,” Elon Packin said. “When I first transitioned to startups from investment banking, I had hoped to find the energy I could feel when reading about the early innings of Nike in Shoe Dog. Chariot has given me that and so much more.”
The hierarchy at Chariot is flat, “like a sports team,” and there’s not much (or any) micromanaging. “Compared to my past jobs, I feel like I have the most autonomy at Chariot,” said Julia Rosenson, a software engineer. “I feel trusted to prioritize work, advocate for what I think are the most important initiatives, and question any requirements presented to me.”
The work is hard, as you might expect. It is also, encouragingly, laser-focused on actual output.
“We care about output and the impact of the output far more than the hours,” Salo said. Chariot is not a startup that spends long hours in the office so they can post about it on LinkedIn; you won’t see them romanticizing the 996 model. Rather, the expectation is that you care about your work and that you do it well. To be as effective as possible, Chariot works in-person in NYC and expects that people work 50 to 60 hours per week. “That turns off 95% of people and that’s fine,” Chariot’s handbook says. “You want to find that 5%.”
There is also plenty of fun stuff. The office has a calendar called the “crashout board” for when people crash out (about a bug, a customer, etc). You get your picture taken and put onto the calendar for the date of your crashout. There’s a gong they hit when closing new sales. There are fantasy sports leagues, games of Mario Kart, annual hackathons, and nonprofit volunteering. There is a LOTR-style “sidequest map” to remind people to stay on-topic. The kinds of quirky fun things people associate—or used to associate—with tech startups definitely exist here.
Should you join Chariot?
Unlike a concerning number of companies in the world, Chariot is public and honest with candidates about what the expectations are: in-person in NYC with workdays from 9AM to 7 or 8PM, some sprints that extend late into the evenings, and most importantly, a real dedication to your work. This is a place where you are expected to actually care (a lot).
In many ways, I get the sense that people who are a fit at Chariot are people who care deeply about the world the company hopes to unlock. The world Chariot is unlocking already: a world where nonprofits have the tools to be far more effective, and where that effective-ness drives real outcomes for real people.
For the right person, Chariot’s mission might have a stronger pull than the average startup. And if you are that person, if you are particularly excited about Chariot’s vision for nonprofit fintech, then deciding to join Chariot might feel like the most obvious thing in the world.
As for what might make you more likely to get hired? Well, Chariot cares more about what you’ve done than if there is a fancy name on your resume. When you apply, “talk about some of the top things you built and why you built them,” Salo said. “We love people who bring their ideas to reality and have novel ideas for how to solve tricky problems.”
Chariot is currently hiring across most departments in NYC. See their open roles here.
Thanks to Chariot for supporting Next Play and making this essay possible.