It's Time to Rewire Generosity

For most of my working life I assumed philanthropy’s central problem was persuasion. Convince more people with means to give, and the causes would be funded. After two decades inside the sector, running Ashoka across Europe, leading the Association of German Foundations, advising the European Commission on a single market for philanthropy, I hold a different view. The capital exists in abundance. The wiring that should carry it to good causes was laid for a different century, and most of it has barely been touched since.

Take the German picture, the one I know best. Foundations sit on more than 100 billion euros in endowments and pay out roughly one percent of that a year. Last year, for the first time, fewer than half of Germans gave to charity at all. High earners give about half as much, measured as a share of income, as people on low and middle incomes. Add it up and a philanthropy gap opens of around 30 billion euros a year in Germany alone. That is money that could be working on climate, education, democracy and care, sitting idle inside structures that are too slow, too expensive and too analogue to move it.

This is what I mean by the infrastructure of generosity. Every gift travels through something: a bank, a charity’s back office, a foundation’s board, a tax authority’s rules, a lawyer’s opinion on whether a cross-border transfer is even permitted. When that something is manual, bound to one jurisdiction and priced for the very wealthy, giving stays small and stays local. bcause exists to rewire it.

The phrase we work by is plain. Everyone a philanthropist. For a century, the serious tools of giving, the named fund that carries a family’s intent across generations, the endowment that funds a cause in perpetuity, the vehicle that lets you give anonymously or invest for impact, were reserved for people who could afford to set up and run a legal foundation. That meant lawyers, minimum capital, annual filings and a board. The threshold sat in the millions, so the tools sat with the few.

We took the view that these capabilities belong to anyone with the will to give, whether the gift is fifty euros or fifty million. A donor on bcause can open a named fund in minutes, give to a cause across a border, invest part of their giving capital for impact and recommend grants over years, all from one account, with the legal and tax mechanics handled underneath. The fintech sector did this to payments and investing a decade ago. Philanthropy has been waiting.

bcause did not begin as a business plan. In 2019 I started a conversation I called Dialog Neues Geben, New Giving, a forum for a different culture of wealth and engagement. It led, among other things, to a dinner at the residence of the German Federal President with a group of next-generation givers, people who had the means and the will to do more and kept running into the same walls. The idea for bcause came out of those conversations. After the dinner I made a handful of calls. Within weeks a few slides had become a company with a team. We launched in April 2021.

The credibility I brought from the foundation world mattered, and so did the earlier years I had spent as a digital entrepreneur. bcause sits at the meeting point of both: the rigor of charitable law and the build-fast logic of a technology company.

When I went looking for the first capital, something happened that still shapes how I think about the company. Around 30 private individuals came in with the founding round, since extended to 4.7 million euros. That is an unusually large and varied group of believers for a startup at that stage, drawn from business, foundations, technology and public life. Most early companies raise from one or two funds. We raised from a community.

The breadth was the signal. People who have spent their lives close to philanthropy, and people who have built companies from nothing, looked at the same gap and decided it was worth backing. A B round is underway now on the same thesis, that giving needs rails, and that whoever builds them well builds something the whole sector can run on.

Strip away the language and the platform offers a small number of things that, taken together, did not exist as one product before.

The foundation account and named fund is the core. A donor opens an account and gives it a name and a purpose, and from that moment has the working parts of a foundation without the cost, the delay or the paperwork of incorporating one.

Impact investing alongside grants. Giving capital does not have to sit in cash waiting to be granted. On bcause it can be invested for social and environmental return, so the same euro can work twice.

Donor anonymity. Some causes, democracy, journalism, work against extremism, carry real risk for the people who fund them. We let donors give without exposing their identity to the recipient or the public.

An AI-supported compliance layer. Behind the account runs a whitelist of vetted recipient organizations and the legal logic that decides whether a given gift, to a given organization, in a given country, is fundable. This is the part the sector has always done by hand, and the part that has kept cross-border giving slow.

A traffic-light view of fundability. A donor sees green, yellow or red against any organization: green means give now, yellow means checks are pending, red means we cannot route there yet. It turns a question that used to take a lawyer weeks into something a donor reads in a second.

Open, white-label architecture. Banks, advisors, platforms and corporates can run their own giving offer on top of bcause rather than building one. The rails are meant to be shared.

The honest line I draw, and the one I draw for investors too, is between the parts of this that competitors can also do and the parts that are genuinely ours. Basic donation routing is a crowded field. Named funds, impact investing, anonymity and open infrastructure, delivered as one digital product, are where bcause stands apart from the analogue incumbents.

This is where the cross-border story becomes concrete, because this is where the old infrastructure fails most visibly.

A family in Germany wants to support a hospital in Kenya, a university in the United States and a climate organization in Brazil, from one place, with one tax-deductible receipt, without founding entities abroad. Under the old model that is three jurisdictions, three sets of due diligence and a lawyer on each leg. On bcause it is one account. We assume the compliance and legal responsibility for routing each gift to a vetted recipient, in the same way a payments company assumes liability so that a merchant does not have to become a banking expert.

A family office or wealth advisor wants to offer giving as part of the service, next to the portfolio, without their team becoming experts in charitable law across a dozen countries. They run a white-label giving offer on our rails and keep the client relationship.

A corporate foundation wants to put part of its endowment to work through impact investing while continuing to grant. They can do both from one structure.

A donor wants to fund sensitive work abroad and stay anonymous. The account allows it, with the vetting handled underneath.

In each case the advisor’s value rises. The mechanics that used to consume their time are handled, and the conversation with the client moves to where it belongs, which is what the family wants to change in the world.

A platform is only as useful as its reach. Through Germany’s central register of charitable organizations, more than 500,000 nonprofits are reachable from a bcause account. Through our partner giving networks we add over 1,000 vetted organizations across the border. Through partner whitelists, donors can route gifts to recipients in around 70 countries. More than 6,000 users, private individuals, public figures and companies, already give through the platform.

Set those next to the macro numbers, the 100 billion euros earning one percent, the 30 billion euro annual gap, a giving rate that has fallen below half the population, and the case writes itself. The demand is structural and the supply of capital is there. What has been missing is a layer that connects the two at the speed and cost of the internet.

I am wary of the word infrastructure, because in philanthropy it has too often described toll booths: platforms that skim, intermediaries that gatekeep, advisors who price access to generosity by the percentage point. Built that way, infrastructure serves the people who control the pathway more than the people who need the gift.

The infrastructure I want to build does the opposite. It lowers the threshold so a named fund is within reach of an ordinary donor. It carries a gift across a border in seconds and at low cost. It takes on the legal weight so a giver, or their advisor, can give attention to the cause instead of the paperwork. It is open, so others can build on it rather than rebuild it.

That is the work. Rewiring giving so that the act of being generous is as easy, as fast and as far-reaching as the act of spending. When that wiring exists, “everyone a philanthropist” stops being a slogan and starts being a description of how giving actually works.

This is no small change. But we more than double every year. At the speed of trust.