Change.org, the San Francisco, CA-based social change platform, closed a $25m Series C funding.
Backers included:
– Ali and Hadi Partovi (co-founders, Code.org)
– Arianna Huffington (founder, Huffington Post)
– Ariel Poler (chairman, Textmarks)
– Ashton Kutcher & Guy Oseary (A-GRade Investments)
– Bill Gates
– Bryan Johnson (founder, Braintree & OS Fund)
– Dan Rosensweig (CEO, Chegg)
– Diane Tang (fellow, Google)
– Evan Williams (co-founder, Twitter & Obvious Ventures)
– Gideon Yu (former CFO, Facebook & YouTube)
– James Currier (co-founder, Tickle & Ooga Labs)
– Jeff Weiner (CEO, Linkedin)
– Jeffrey Walker (ret. co-founder & managing partner, JPMorgan Partners)
– Jerry Yang (co-founder, Yahoo! & AME Cloud Ventures)
– Joe Lonsdale (co-founder, Palantir)
– Jonathan Sackler (Chairman, Kokino LLC)
– The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation
– Katie Stanton (vice president of global media, Twitter)
– Lorna Borenstein (founder & CEO, Grokker)
– Louis Eisenberg (Facebook)
– Michael Birch (co-founder, Bebo)
– Dr. Mortimer D. Sackler Family
– Nicolas Berggruen (Berggruen Institute)
– Omidyar Network
– Rick Segal (Managing Partner, Rethink)
– Reid Hoffman (co-founder, Linkedin)
– Richard Branson (founder, Virgin Group)
– Sam Altman (president, Y Combinator)
– Shawn Byers (MITS Fund, LLC)
– Trawalla Foundation
– Uprising
– Warner Philips (founder and managing partner, KW Forever Ventures)
Led by founder and CEO Ben Rattray and Jennifer Dulski, president & COO, Change.org is is a Certified ‘B’ Corporation that operates a platform for social change campaigns with over 80 million users in 196 countries.
The company intends to use the funds to expand its engineering team and to scale operations.
Specifically, it will focus on:
– Mobile: Mobile development to enable people to take immediate action based on their location or real-time news;
– Political: Building tools to enable elected officials at all levels of government to directly engage with the increasing number of citizens that are petitioning them for change;
– Global: Supporting the ability of anyone, anywhere to create change through improved localization and translation globally.
FinSMEs
09/12/2014