Parvenu

1. In 2017 almost 7,000 brick-and-mortar retail stores shut down. Meanwhile, Amazon has a market cap $179 billion higher than the next five retailers combined. 

Retailers often partner with nonprofits to demonstrate their brand's values to shoppers by helping the local community in a variety of different ways. 89% of shoppers are willing to switch brands to one that is associated with a good cause.

AmazonSmile has excelled at personalization by raising money for nearly 1 million nonprofits. Until now, storefront brands had no way of asking for donations for more than a single nonprofit at checkout because of outdated technology. All too often, storefront checkout campaigns are extremely expensive to run. In addition, they lack transparency; donors don't know who really benefits from their donation. 

2. Parvenu's platform benefits retailers, shoppers, and nonprofits. Our platform grants retailers increased loyalty, boosted sales, and differentiation from their competition by asking shoppers to donate to a cause personalized to their shopping preferences. Instead of asking for donations for a single nonprofit, our patent-pending technology asks the mom getting diapers to give to the children’s hunger charity, the lady behind her grabbing dog food to donate to the local animal shelter, and the man refilling his dad’s medicine to donate to a related health charity. 

We increase transparency and create engagement with shoppers by offering a beautiful display at checkout that provides the specific project in the local community that benefits from the donation, a progress thermometer so shoppers know how close the project is to its funding goal, and the nonprofit's Charity Navigator ranking. Parvenu's Pre-Check feature outperformed the success rate of traditional methods by more than 3x across 5 store locations!

3. Parvenu is changing the world be creating an entire culture of giving. Our vision is to normalize giving at the point of sale. With predictive alignment, no longer will retailers only raise money for a single charity. Now, the smaller charities can compete. We can create a sustainable revenue stream for ALL types of causes, not just a select few. With this system in place, we can go beyond raising money for traditionally common causes, but also target the education sector!

Traditional checkout campaigns ask the customer, “Would you like to donate?” This opt-in method of asking for a donation frames not donating as the default choice. Opt-in POS donation has yielded an 8% success rate. Parvenu’s platform fosters a culture of giving by choosing to Pre-Check the donation box for the shopper. This opt-out method frames donating as the default choice. This approach has yielded a 25% success rate, with zero customer complaints.

We commonly explain our platform by discussing predictive alignment: matching items like dog food purchases to animal shelters.

In addition to types of items being purchased, our platform also uses the number of specific items, total cart size, on-sale vs. premium items, and shopping habits over time if the shopper is part of the retailer’s established loyalty program. These data points help us generate profiles of a shopper to most accurately predict what they care about. AI can pinpoint the needs of a shopper more precisely than any human ever could by analyzing data manually.

June - July 2018: Close seed round through equity crowdfund campaign

August 2018 - October 2018: Build MVP and begin hypothesis testing while marketing for successful launch in partnership with Zygosys

October 2018 - Dec 2018: Revenue begins, continue improvements through DevOps model

Our vision is to scale so that we are easily found in retail stores across the country, raising donations that go toward education everywhere there are transactions - in store, mobile, and online.

Our solution will raise money that will be transferred to a donor-advised fund, which will in turn disperse the money to the relevant causes.

In the next 12 months, we expect to have scaled to over 200 locations, raising money for multiple education causes. In 3 years, we intend to reach 1500+ locations.

Patrick Hoban, CEO - background in fundraising

Johnny Li, COO - background in fintech

Krista Conley, CSO - 2 exits, background in health tech and angel investing

Revenue comes from transaction fees on each donation made through the platform. Nonprofits can choose to be displayed more often and during peak hours by paying a higher transaction fee. Retailers can choose higher levels of engagement like beacons by paying higher transaction fees.

Crowdfunding for donations reached $5.5 billion in 2015 and the Crowdfunding industry is expected to reach $300 billion by 2025. We are the first movers to bring crowdfunding to the point of sale. In addition, charity checkout is already a $441m industry. Everywhere there are retailers, Parvenu can be. We are omni-channel, so we can scale to online retail as well.

We are applying to Solve because its commitment to using technology to leverage sustainable impact aligns with ours. Although our project is not directly in education, but rather, raises money for such endeavors, we consider the vision alignment with Solve more important.

Our key barrier to entry right now is raising a higher seed, which we hope Solve can help with. In addition, we are looking to expand our network in order to gain access to more tech resources at MIT and retailers to ensure a successful initial launch.