Why We’re Fundraising on Wefunder

You might have seen that we recently launched a community funding round on Wefunder, where anyone can invest as little as $100.

Why did we decide to do this?

OpenGrants is on a mission to deploy modern financial infrastructure to support efficient, equitable, and transparent grant funding processes. We believe this work is imperative to strengthen democracy and solve the challenges of equity, competitiveness and innovation, among others.

But we can’t achieve this mission alone. From day one, we’ve been engaging with stakeholders from every corner of the grant funding ecosystem, including grant seekers, grant writers, private foundations, economic development leaders, and public sector leaders at all levels.

We’ve always planned on including our community as financial partners in this venture. For that reason, contractors on our platform have access to earn $GRANT and can receive equity in the company. Accredited investors can purchase $GRANT as well.

Now, we’ve launched the Wefunder round so you can invest, whether or not you’re accredited, with as little as $100. If you feel passionate about our mission, you’re now able to support that mission and become a very tangible part of what we’re building to accomplish it.

Our investors will receive a number of benefits depending on their level of investment, including exclusive access to our investor Discord channels, invitations to investor-only virtual events, a free subscription to OpenGrants Pro, credits toward a grant consultant or enterprise product, and at the highest level, an invitation to join the OpenGrants team for our retreat and strategic planning session on the northern coast of California.

Our focus over the next few years is to continue embracing an API-first future, where OpenGrants will efficiently provide ecosystem data and grant matching tools, as well as modern financial infrastructure. We seek to become a global, public infrastructure that is in part owned by the public. Integrations with our partners will support the quality and capabilities of the ecosystem overall, further enriching our own data products and improving the ML and AI driven matching and evaluation features. Our long-term goals include serving the majority of the world’s grant seekers, independent grant writers, and grant makers as users, and improving the efficiency of global grant funds by at least 20%.

We hope you consider joining us on this journey!