Givestar raises $12 million for UK growth and US expansion
Howard Lake | 29 September 2026 | News
Givestar, the fundraising platform that links events, fundraisers, donors and charities, has raised $12 million (about £9m). The round was led by Mercia Ventures, with Love Ventures also taking part.
The company says this is its largest funding round so far, and “one of the largest ever raised” by a UK giving or fundraising technology platform. The money will pay for continued growth in the UK and a major expansion in the US. It will also fund product development and more staff.
From collection tin to platform
Givestar started in 2019. Its co-founders, Tom Montague and Alex Coleridge, were concerned that charities were struggling to keep up as people carried less cash. Their first idea was to turn smartphones into contactless donation points. The first £2 donation was taken on a prototype card reader outside Topshop on Oxford Street.
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Since then the business has grown into a wider platform covering digital fundraising, event fundraising, supporter engagement and stewardship.
Givestar reports:
- nearly 800,000 user accounts created
- more than $70 million (about £52 million) raised for over 4,000 charities
- active fundraisers up 225% this year, to around 27,000
- 76% of users aged under 35.
Built into mass participation events
Givestar’s growth has been driven through securing official fundraising platform for UK event organisers. These include RunThrough, Tough Mudder UK, Spartan UK, Ultra Events and Ultra X. Together they cover hundreds of events, so charities can reach new fundraisers at the moment they sign up to take part.
The company describes this as a network effect. Events bring in fundraisers, fundraisers bring in donors, and charities gain supporters they can keep in touch with after the event ends.
One of its more successful users is Russ Cook (Hardest Geezer) who has raised over £1 million through the platform.
Tom Montague, co-founder, said:
“When we started givestar, we’d noticed that young people hadn’t stopped caring about causes, they’d just stopped carrying cash. So we put the collection tin on the phone.”
He added that fundraising “is still fragmented across events, fundraisers, donors and charities”, and that the new investment “gives us the firepower to take that ambition much further, particularly in the US.”
US ambitions
Givestar already works with more than 70 events in the US, including Bay to Breakers, the Las Vegas Marathon and the Portland Marathon. Earlier this year it became the Official U.S. Fundraising Partner to Spartan and Tough Mudder, which brings its technology to hundreds of thousands of participants each year.
Hugo Lough, investor at Mercia Ventures, said much of the technology used by charities “has struggled to keep pace” with how fundraising behaviour has changed. He said givestar was “embedding fundraising into the places where it naturally begins” by working with some of the biggest participation events in the UK and US.
- Give A Little’s cashless giving community passes £100 million raised for good causes (13 July 2026)
- Givestar offers £100,000 through its Adventure for Good Grant (19 June 2025)
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.