The wait is finally over, and we are delighted to announce the nine organizations in our 2016 accelerator cohort. We received over 150 applications this year, meaning our application pool grew 3x since year 1. This represents a significant milestone for us in our mission to foster an ecosystem of support for the expanding number of tech nonprofits. We’re also thrilled to announce today that we’ve raised $1.25 million in philanthropic funding from Omidyar Network, Google.org, BlackRock, AT&T, The Nasiri Foundation and Rita Allen Foundation.
It’s incredibly rewarding for us to see new tech nonprofits emerging and interest from investors, tech companies and entrepreneurs increasing as we continue to grow. We believe it’s critical to equip organizations solving social issues like human rights, health care, and education with the technology they need to create meaningful impact.
Our commitment to diversity in terms of both issue areas and the backgrounds of founders is unwavering. This year 78% of our founders are women or people of color, and 55% have set out to solve problems they experienced personally. Organizations in our 2016 cohort are building solutions to social problems ranging from education to social services to human rights.
These organizations are already driving innovation in the social good sphere, and we are counting down the days (7!) until we officially kick off the summer program.
Without further ado, here are the nine tech nonprofits in our 2016 accelerator cohort:
- CommonLit: equips educators with high-quality, standards-aligned digital literacy tools
- Democracy Earth Foundation: incorruptible digital voting technology
- Hack Club: platform for high schoolers to start awesome after-school coding clubs
- Intelehealth: open-source mobile telemedicine platform for last mile health care delivery
- JustFix.nyc: arming tenants in neglectful housing situations with tech for legal empowerment
- Learn Fresh: education game developer integrating professional sports to teach math
- Open Media Project: live and on-demand searchable media software for governments
- Think of Us: tech that improves the lives of foster youth and systems they are connected to
- We The Protesters: digital tools for activism to end police violence and systemic racism in the US
We’re also launching a new Summer Advisors program this summer, which connects some of the best tech talent in the Bay Area with our inspiring tech nonprofit founders for in-depth mentorship throughout the accelerator.
Fast Forward’s Summer Advisors include Aston Motes, 1st employee at Dropbox; Seema Shah, former Head of Product at TaskRabbit; Rekha Pai Kamath, Head of New Business Incubation for Juniper Networks; Anil Kamath, VP Technology at Adobe; Raphael Lee, creator of Airbnb’s Data Tools team; Rahim Fazal, Founder of Involver (acquired by Oracle); Arjun Dev Arora, founder of ReTargeter; Michele Law, Chief Revenue Officer of Castlight Health; and Philippe Suchet, Founder of Zappli (acquired by Shopzilla).
In 2015 our alumni impacted over 3.4M lives, saw 53% median revenue growth, and wrote almost 1.5 million lines of code. The future is bright for the tech nonprofit world. As the number of tech nonprofits in our community expands each year, we are filled with gratitude for the support from our investors, mentors, corporate partners and speakers who help make the program what it is. We can’t wait to share more details on our cohort and the accelerator program over the summer months! Stay tuned.
