Watsi Raises $3.5M Philanthropic Growth Round To Reach 1M Patients By 2020
Silicon Valley nonprofit raises second round of operational funding, led by Paul Graham, Tencent, and The Pershing Square Foundation, to scale online health system.
SAN FRANCISCO — November 4th, 2015 — Watsi, the nonprofit that enables anyone to directly fund life-changing healthcare for people around the world, today announced it has raised $3.5M in donations towards its operations in what it is calling a ‘philanthropic growth round.’
Watsi was the first nonprofit to graduate from Y Combinator and raise a startup-style seed round in 2013. Since then, Watsi has grown 20x, funding healthcare for more than 5,000 patients and proving its crowdfunding concept. The organization has expanded geographically, and now supports patients in 20 countries, including Cambodia, Kenya, Tanzania, Guatemala, and Nepal. It has also expanded its medical focus, now providing funding for more than 170 different procedures, including heart surgery, cancer care, and brain tumor removals.
The round of donations was made possible by philanthropists and foundations, including Paul Graham, Tencent, The Pershing Square Foundation, Ron Conway, Vinod Khosla, Jasmine Social Investments, Supercell founders Ilkka Paananen and Mikko Kodisoja, The Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation, and Paul Buchheit. On Watsi’s website, 100% of every donation funds healthcare. Support from these funders will cover Watsi’s operational expenses, and enable Watsi to grow its team (the nonprofit has already recruited engineers from NASA, Microsoft, and Palantir), improve its platform, and scale its online system that connects health funders directly to people in need of healthcare.
Expanding its online health system will enable even more individual donors to make personal donations on Watsi — 100% of donations on Watsi’s website directly fund healthcare for patients. Meanwhile, the world’s largest health funders (governments, foundations) still finance healthcare using pen and paper, deploying money through layers of subcontractors and bureaucracy. The World Health Organization estimates that up to 40% of the $7 trillion intended to fund healthcare around the world each year is lost to inefficiency and corruption.
As Watsi expands, it expects the world’s largest health funders to join individual donors in using its system to fund healthcare online. Technology is connecting the world, and if Watsi becomes the first system to bring global health financing online, it will reach its goal of supporting 1M patients by 2020 and have an opportunity change the future of healthcare.
About Watsi
Watsi, based in San Francisco, is a nonprofit that enables anyone to donate as little as $5 to directly fund life-changing healthcare for people around the world. 100% of donations fund healthcare, and the organization is dedicated to radical transparency. To learn more about Watsi, please visit www.watsi.org
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