Our second tender offer in three years—and what it means for the future of GiveCampus
Dec 2025 - READ IN 2 MINUTES
We recently celebrated the completion of a $140 million growth investment valuing GiveCampus at more than double our prior valuation. As part of this transaction, we facilitated the second major liquidity event for GiveCampus employees in less than three years—with investors purchasing stock directly from employees in a tender offer.
This milestone is a testament to all that our team has achieved in recent years. It’s also a strong validation of our Sustainable Growth strategy and the size of the opportunity still in front of us. Investors were eager to buy GiveCampus stock because of our growth trajectory and also because of our efficiency: we’ve doubled our revenue over the last two years and we’ve been profitable nine of the last 10.
Most importantly, we are playing an increasingly significant role in advancing the quality, the affordability, and the accessibility of education. Tens of thousands of fundraisers rely on GiveCampus to power a growing share of their most important, mission-critical work. Millions of donors use our platform to support programs, causes, and initiatives that they care about. And at our current pace, we will facilitate more than $100 billion in charitable giving over the next decade. That’s enough money to send more than 1 million students to college, tuition-free.
At our current pace, we will facilitate more than $100 billion in charitable giving over the next decade. That’s enough money to send more than 1 million students to college, tuition-free.Kestrel Linder GiveCampus
Why employee liquidity matters
When we started GiveCampus in 2014, we reserved a large portion of the company–20%–to be owned by employees. We wanted the people building this company to share meaningfully in its growth and success.
As a result of this tender offer and the tender offer we facilitated in late 2022, GiveCampus employees have now received more cash from investors than the company has. For some team members, this has meant paying off student loans, going on a dream vacation, or buying their first home. For all of us, it is tangible proof that you can, in fact, do well while doing good.
Converting employees’ equity into cash is part of every startup’s dream, but employee liquidity is exceptionally rare. Carta, one of the largest facilitators of private company tender offers, administers only ~60-100 tender offers each year. And according to PitchBook and the National Venture Capital Association, the vast majority of liquidity is concentrated among a very small handful of companies. We are proud to be part of a group that also includes Stripe, OpenAI, Rippling, Ramp, Vercel, Databricks, and Clay.
One advantage of our sustained profitability has been the preservation of employees’ substantial ownership position: while most companies that reach our stage have diluted employee ownership by 50-70% in the course of raising multiple rounds of external financing, we have raised very little outside capital and we have diluted employee ownership by less than 14%. Thanks to this minimal dilution, GiveCampus employees will continue to own a large share of the company even as its valuation continues to grow.
Our focus for the future
Looking ahead, some things will change at GiveCampus but many things will stay the same. While some of our competitors are expanding to serve other industries and other types of organizations, we will stay laser-focused on supporting fundraisers at educational institutions. While others in our space have sold majority stakes to investors, we remain founder-led and founder-controlled. And while many invest most heavily in sales and marketing, we will continue investing most aggressively in the quality of our products and the service we deliver alongside them.
Nothing matters more to us than the day-to-day experience we deliver to our partners and the value that schools derive from our partnership. This is why we’re in the midst of investing $100 million in product development. We’re strengthening and enhancing the GiveCampus products that 1,500 colleges, universities, and K12 schools rely on every day. We’re building new solutions designed to help fundraisers meet the next decade of challenges. And we’re doubling down on our artificial intelligence and machine learning system, GC Intelligence–which more schools are leveraging each day to improve efficiency and increase productivity across a range of critical workflows. (Watch our 2025 conference keynote highlighting recent and upcoming product development.)
Join us
As we start the next chapter in our journey, we’re excited to welcome JMI Equity to the GiveCampus team as a new minority investor alongside Y Combinator, Silversmith Capital, Michael Seibel, Stripe’s Claire Hughes Johnson, founding HubSpot team member Mike Volpe, and others. JMI has a storied 30+ year history of supporting vertically-focused companies like us and this transaction presented a perfect opportunity to bring them aboard.
We’re proud of what we’ve achieved over the last decade, but we’re even more excited about what’s ahead. These are still early days at GiveCampus, and every member of our team has the opportunity to deliver an outsized impact on our company’s future and the future of education. If you want to join a fast-growing, mission-driven, profitable company with a proven track record of facilitating meaningful liquidity for employees, check out our open roles.