1) When was Kambeo created and what was the idea behind the brand?
The initial idea for Kambeo came to be in July 2015. The goal was to build a platform that could seamlessly connect people in the community who wanted to help with those who needed it. Our initial concept was focused around connecting youth to the community for paid work, but we quickly found that volunteering was a better initial use case.
2) What inspired Kambeo’s transformation from a volunteer software into a social impact platform?
When we were getting started, our local volunteer centre had just shut down. There was a gap in our community that left around 500 charities with no way to find volunteers. While working with those organizations and our local high school board to provide a better solution for connecting volunteers to charities, we uncovered a wildly fragmented software market for charities.
Charities were looking for a single platform that was cost effective and could better support all the tasks they needed to do. From fundraising to donor management to volunteer recruitment—nobody had done this effectively. Furthermore, we found that any solution in the market was an internally facing solution for the charity. Because of this, volunteers and supporters had no way to aggregate the giving they are doing into a meaningful profile that can be shared.
The social element added to Kambeo is about providing a place where charities, supporters, and companies can build their social impact story and have something of value to show for it beyond the initial reward of feeling good and helping others.
3) What have been some of the biggest feature updates to the platform from a product standpoint?
There have been a couple of major product releases for our platform. Our plan was to launch the platform in three major phases. In our first production version of the product, we focused on building a world-class event platform and management solution for charities. This would be the foundation for the next two phases. We ended up doing phases 2 and 3 together when we launched a major release in the summer of 2022 that included a full social media network and a new B2B offering for companies to build their social impact programs.
4) What are some of the most significant milestones the team at Kambeo has achieved throughout this evolution?
I think the largest milestones from a product perspective are aligned with the major releases mentioned above. Other major milestones would be our ability to raise our seed round of 5M in 2021 and our first paying customers on our new B2B offering in October 2022.
5) How is Kambeo different than any other social impact platform on the market?
No other platform has taken on the ambitious goal of connecting all three aspects of this market: charities who need resources, individuals who want to give back, and companies looking to build their social impact story.
There are many solutions in all three of these verticals, but nobody has brought them together in the way that Kambeo has. A seamlessly integrated platform that connects those who need resources with those who have them. With the scale of a social network layered on top of two world-class solutions for charities and companies, Kambeo has the ability to substantially disrupt a market that is overdue for new innovation.
