Challenge

CEO and Cofounder François de Kerret was frustrated by how difficult it was to support nonprofits. Unlike booking an Airbnb or ordering dinner with a few taps on an app, donating to nonprofits is often a cumbersome and opaque process. Many organizations have clunky payment systems and unclear fee structures that leave donors wondering how much of their $100 donation will actually help fund organizations such as their local food bank.

On the other side of the donor ecosystem, nonprofits face immense budget pressures because donors want 100% of their contributions to go directly to the cause. Yet, traditional fundraising platforms charge nonprofits 2%–8% in fees. This forces organizations to choose between operational efficiency and meeting donor expectations.

In 2018, de Kerret cofounded Zeffy to offer nonprofits a completely free platform, funded through optional contributions from donors. As a bootstrapped startup, Zeffy needed to launch quickly. The founders gave themselves just two weeks to get up and running. Zeffy required a payment partner that could handle complex multiparty transactions and also support popular payment methods to increase donor conversion. Because Zeffy covers all fees for nonprofits, these capabilities were key for Zeffy’s longevity.

As it grew, Zeffy also needed a partner that could help it address an important gap: many nonprofits were stuck with basic bank accounts that charged monthly fees when balances dropped too low. These organizations couldn’t access features such as faster money movement, fee waivers, or advanced financial tools that larger businesses take for granted. Zeffy also needed robust fraud protection to safeguard nonprofits and donors from fraudulent transactions and payment disputes. Finally, as a venture-backed company, Zeffy needed tools that would help the company swiftly expand internationally to demonstrate its market capabilities to investors.

Solution

Zeffy chose Stripe from day one to process donations to nonprofits, initially implementing Stripe Payments to enable its fundraising platform. Over time, Zeffy optimized its setup to maximize donor conversion rates through features such as network tokens and Adaptive Acceptance that help ensure payments go through successfully. This included enabling Apple Pay and Google Pay for faster checkout, and offering ACH payments to reduce costs on large donations. To streamline ACH payment verification, Zeffy adopted Stripe Financial Connections, which allowed nonprofits to instantly verify donors’ bank accounts.

With rapid growth underway, Zeffy set out to become a more comprehensive “business-in-a-box” that would include banking services, expense management, and financial tools for nonprofits. To support this vision, Zeffy wanted payment onboarding to be fully embedded in its platform, rather than sending users to a third-party site. Instead, by using Stripe Connect, Zeffy could quickly let nonprofits sign up, verify their information, and start accepting donations—all within Zeffy’s platform—while still meeting regulatory requirements. This freed up Zeffy’s team to focus on building features tailored to nonprofits, rather than compliance infrastructure.

As its platform matured, Zeffy enhanced its Connect integration, rolling out a cobranded onboarding flow that blends Stripe’s KYC processes with Zeffy’s own interface—maintaining a seamless user experience while leveraging Stripe’s hosted onboarding.

Building on that initial success, Zeffy expanded its offerings to help organizations manage more of their financial operations in one place. The company added Stripe Treasury, which enabled nonprofits to earn rewards on donation balances and access advanced features such as withdrawals.

Stripe Radar provided key fraud protection as Zeffy grew, using AI trained on data across millions of global companies to predict and block fraud. With Radar, Zeffy could identify organizations showing patterns of suspicious activity, including those that weren’t meeting Zeffy’s terms and conditions, as well as legitimate nonprofits that were being targeted by fraudulent activity such as card testing. And when Zeffy needed to quickly establish operations in the US during its Series A fundraising round, Stripe Atlas enabled the company to easily incorporate in Delaware and get a US tax ID in just a few clicks through next-day expedited processing.

Results

Zeffy launched donation processing in two weeks with Payments

Using Payments’ easy integration process, Zeffy launched the first version of its donation processing feature shortly after the company’s genesis. This timeline would have been impossible without Stripe’s developer-friendly APIs and comprehensive documentation. The bootstrapped startup successfully launched its first donation processing feature within its ambitious deadline: “We had to go super fast,” said de Kerret. “We actually achieved the first donation version in just two weeks.”

More than one million payments processed across multiple payment methods through Payments

Zeffy’s strategic implementation of multiple payment methods—including Apple Pay and Google Pay for faster checkout, as well as ACH—has contributed to processing more than one million payments on Stripe. The platform’s high acceptance rates across these diverse payment methods have been significant for donor conversion.

Donation volume grew 30x to over $1 billion in 3 years through Connect

From 2022 to 2025, Zeffy multiplied donation volume by 30x, reaching over $1 billion in total donations processed. This exponential growth was enabled by Connect’s ability to help Zeffy grow its nonprofit base faster, reliably process payments and payout volume, and expand its payment method portfolio to meet changing donor preferences.

Zeffy only needed one developer to implement Stripe

Zeffy now supports over 50,000 nonprofits with Connect, processing hundreds of millions in monthly donations. When Zeffy first implemented Connect, the process was seamless.

“In five-and-a-half years, we went from zero to $100 million in monthly payouts with Stripe,” said de Kerret. “During that time, one dev was enough to adapt the Stripe infrastructure.”

Zeffy rapidly expanded internationally with Atlas

Zeffy successfully expanded from Canada to the US and the UK using Atlas, completing the process within “a couple of hours,” according to de Kerret. This speed allowed Zeffy to demonstrate US market capabilities to investors on a tight timeline.