Investing in Captain Cause

We’re thrilled to announce that we’re leading Captain Cause’s €3.5M Seed round, alongside MAIF Impact, Daphni, AFI Ventures, and VNV Global. The startup connects companies with social and environmental causes through a one-stop-shop platform. By facilitating the financing of impact projects, companies also involve their customers, partners, and employees in the choice of these causes. Its ambition is to distribute one billion euros of donations within five years.

Captain Cause is one of our favorite types of impact and fintech businesses — one that is built by seasoned entrepreneurs to solve massive problems. We’re so excited to back the founding team with Frederic Mazzella (President and co-founder of Blablacar), Georges Basdevant (CEO), Nathanael Romano (CTO), Maxence Mathey (Product), and Clara Pigé (Operations) and the team in their journey to build a powerful impact marketing platform at scale. At the end of the day, businesses are all about the teams that build them. By combining Frederic’s experience building Blablacar with his co-founder’s talents and operating capabilities, we believe that they are perfectly armed to achieve their ambition and this is why we are so excited to join them.

Looking at the current environment, there is a soaring demand from companies to create stronger ties between them and all of their stakeholders. Everybody is implementing sustainable initiatives to do so but having a true impact and leveraging a responsible image is a tricky and never-enough process that can disguise ESG-washing and insincerity. Customers are now more than ever concerned about environmental and social topics, and companies are under pressure to act and to show how they act. People now expect companies to redirect some of their financial performances to some greater causes.

Of course, some companies are already donating money to charities and some are already supporting impact causes, however, there is an issue in how it’s done today: projects are systematically selected in a centralized way, by a few people at the top of the company, leaving all stakeholders aside in the decision-making process.

This is precisely why we are so excited to back Captain Cause. The platform helps companies to finance vetted impact projects while managing the donation process at scale, in a fully decentralized way. They run the admin, legal, and financial procedures that come with them and engage the companies’ different stakeholders in picking the causes that matter the most to them.

The team is addressing a major market opportunity, with strong first achievements and a clear path to build impact marketing at scale, at a time of social and environmental emergency.

Welcome to the OneRagtime family!