After nearly a decade of advising nonprofits and grantmakers of all sizes, Sevetri Wilson set her sights on using technology to transform the nonprofit sector.
In 2016, she launched Resilia, a software solution that enables nonprofits to increase capacity and funders to go beyond their grant allocations with technical assistance, coaching, and capacity-building support.
Resilia has over 15,000 nonprofit users and enterprise customers including Oxfam America, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Goldman Sachs’s One Million Black Women Initiative, Silicon Valley Community Foundation, the United States Tennis Association Foundation, and The Boston Foundation.
The company has experienced over 300% annual revenue growth while growing net revenue retention by greater than 150%.
On Thursday, the New Orleans and NYC-based company announced that it has closed $35M in a history-making series B round to further help nonprofits increase their day-to-day capacity and funders scale impact through resources that extend beyond just a monetary grant.
The round was co-led by Panoramic Ventures and Framework Venture Partners. Returning investors include Mucker Capital, Callais Capital, Cultivation Capital, Engage Ventures, SoftBank Group’s SB Opportunity Fund, Kimble Ventures, The Jump Fund, and Fearless Fund. New investors include Goldman Sachs Asset Management Fund, Chloe Capital, Gaingels, Mana Ventures, and others.
The latest funding will be used to scale Resilia’s technology platform and expand access to the sector by bringing more North American organizations into its ecosystem—and comes at a time when 86% of U.S. grantmakers provide capacity-building support to nonprofits through investments in areas such as leadership development, fundraising, evaluation and learning, communications, technology, collaboration, or DE&I.
Further, capacity-building assistance “beyond the grant” [such as Resilia’s platform] is a key pathway for funders seeking to support equity and justice efforts, according to the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy.
“Our goal at Resilia has always been to provide nonprofits with access—something our team has worked tirelessly to do,” said Wilson in a recent press release. “This latest investment gets us closer to realizing our vision of democratizing philanthropy by reallocating power over its decision-making and resources as well as providing more seats at the table.”
While Black and Latina women founders received less than 1% of VC funding combined in 2021, Resilia’s latest capital raise marks another historic feat: it is the largest raise ever for a solo Black female-founded tech company, and also marks the largest VC raise of a female founder in the state of Louisiana.
Resilia first made history when it closed an $8M Series A in 2020, the highest venture capital raise by a woman-founded tech company in the state of Louisiana.
With close to $50M in venture capital to date, Resilia’s latest funding round marks the largest raise ever for a solo Black woman-founded tech company.
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