Fast Forward's 2025 Impact Report
A Look Back at 2025
The most important work in technology is happening at nonprofits. They're building solutions that markets won't, and for people who need them the most.
Fast Forward was founded to back these organizations. Since 2014, our Accelerator has brought more than 100 tech nonprofits into our portfolio, and our open tools, programs, and resources have supported thousands more.
In 2025, the pace of AI made this work both more urgent and more possible. Tech nonprofits moved quickly, experimenting, building, and asking hard questions about how new technology should serve the communities at the center of their missions.
For many across the Fast Forward portfolio, that meant integrating AI into their core solutions. Today, 75% of our portfolio nonprofits use AI to drive impact. But what matters most isn’t the technology itself — it’s the growing number of people these solutions continue to reach.
Behind this work are the builders. 85% of organizations have a founder who has lived experience with the problem they're solving. They represent diverse backgrounds: 75% have a founder who is a person of color, 62% have a woman founder, and 26% have a Black founder.
This impact belongs to our community: founders, funders, and technologists working toward something bigger than any one organization. Here’s what we did in 2025.
AI for Humanity
If 2024 helped the social sector make sense of AI, 2025 was the year momentum turned into action. Fast Forward focused on giving the ecosystem the research, skills, and tools to move from inspiration to responsible implementation.
We published the 2025 AI for Humanity Report in partnership with Google.org, offering a closer look into the impact and challenges of AI-powered nonprofits through data and case studies. We launched AI and Data Bootcamps to build practical AI and data skills across the nonprofit community. And we introduced the Nonprofit AI Policy Builder, a free tool to help organizations adopt AI thoughtfully and safely.
Alongside this work, we continued telling the stories of the builders shaping this space through Kevin Barenblat’s AI for Humanity platform and our Humans of AI for Humanity series, created in partnership with the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation.
Our support directly helped 300+ AI-powered nonprofits across 40 countries, while also guiding a broader community of nonprofits beginning their journey with AI.
Sector Resource
The 2025 AI for Humanity Report
AI is moving fast — and the social sector is moving with it. To capture this moment and what it means for the ecosystem, we partnered with Google.org to publish the 2025 AI for Humanity Report. The report is packed with original data, case studies, and actionable takeaways, offering clear guidance for funders and builders. It’s quickly becoming a widely referenced resource across the sector.
Program
AI and Data Bootcamps
Fast Forward’s AI & Data Bootcamps brought together 185 tech nonprofits for four days of virtual learning. Builders left with stronger AI and data foundations and new relationships to support the work ahead.
Builder Story
Lauren Lichtman & Navya Akkinepally
For the 2.6B people still offline, AI tools to support learning often aren’t an option. Navya Akkinepally and Lauren Lichtman are working to change that at Learning Equality.
Newsletter
AI for Humanity Newsletter
Written by Kevin Barenblat, AI for Humanity explores the evolving intersection of AI and social impact. In 2025, he dove into AI agents, open-source AI, and the builders bringing these ideas to life.
Builder Story
Kasumi Quinlan
Kasumi Quinlan built Lemontree to solve a frustrating truth: food isn’t scarce, access is. Their AI-powered tool helps families find the right free food options nearby.
Builder Story
Rodrigo Camarena
Every year in New York State alone, around 21M workers are cheated out of a cumulative $3.2B in wages and benefits. Rodrigo Camarena built Reclamo AI to help these workers access justice.
Sector Resource
Nonprofit AI Policy Builder
AI is changing how nonprofits work, but without clear policies, it’s risky business. Enter Fast Forward’s Nonprofit AI Policy Builder: a free, easy-to-use tool designed to help nonprofits create their own AI usage policy.
Our 12th Cohort
In 2014, Fast Forward launched the first and only accelerator for tech nonprofits. Every year, the Accelerator helps founders perfect their pitch, upgrade their tech, and scale solutions to meet the size of the problems they’re solving.
Our 2025 Accelerator brought together ten incredible tech and AI-powered nonprofits. They’re building tech to expand healthcare access, close the racial wealth gap, fight climate change, and more. 70% of these organizations have a leader with lived experience — people creating the tools they wished their communities had.
In the months since the program ended, the cohort has already raised $8M. If there’s one thing we know about these founders, it’s that they’re just getting started.
Blog
Meet the 2025 Accelerator Cohort
Ten nonprofits. Ten bold solutions. From a digital mortgage readiness tool closing the racial wealth gap for Black families to an AI platform supporting the development of bio-based plastic alternatives, the 2025 Accelerator cohort is building tech where it matters most.
Press
Powering a New Era of Community Health
It didn’t take long for the 2025 cohort to get noticed. TriplePundit spotlighted both Visilant and VectorCam, whose AI-powered tools help community health workers diagnose eye disease and detect malaria-carrying mosquitoes.
Press
Violetta Co-Founders Win 30 Under 30
Floretta Mayerson and Sara Kalach lead Violetta, building AI tools that help create violence-free relationships in Mexico and Latin America. Violetta has helped more than 250K people access critical advice and resources.
Event
Demo Day
Three months culminated in three minutes: Demo Day. After weeks of preparation, ten founders stepped onto the Demo Day stage to share their stories. Hundreds of leaders across tech and social impact filled the room. They came to learn, and many left ready to support.
Blog
Shaping AI With Global Input
Divya Siddarth is working to ensure AI reflects the voices of the people it impacts. Through the Collective Intelligence Project, she brings public input directly into how frontier AI is built, turning global perspectives into real guidance for the systems shaping our future.
Partner Blog
Stories That Carried Further
Demo Day drew the attention of leaders across tech and media. Ed Ludlow, Journalist and Co-Host of Bloomberg Technology, joined the event and later wrote about the experience, spotlighting the 2025 cohort’s founders and the powerful stories behind their work.
Portfolio
Some things haven’t changed — we remain the only accelerator exclusively for tech nonprofits. But our support has grown alongside our community. In 2025, we strengthened our offerings to support organizations long after the Accelerator.
We brought our community together in person for the second annual Alumni Retreat, creating space to connect and build alongside one another. And through Portfolio Services, we continued the foundation established in the Accelerator, diving deep into the core components of scaling lasting tech nonprofits.
Program
Alumni Retreat
Our second annual Alumni Retreat drew 107 leaders from 54 organizations to San Francisco. The agenda was driven by our alumni themselves, sharing hard-won wisdom, swapping resources, and deepening the relationships that sustain their work.
We were also joined by external experts, including New York Times journalist Kevin Roose and Bloomberg Beta’s Roy Bahat, who brought fresh perspectives to conversations about what comes next.
Program
Portfolio Services
Through our Portfolio Services, Fast Forward invests in teams for the long term. In 2025, we expanded our offerings to fully cover nine high-touch programs spanning strategy, fundraising, AI, and more.
The results are tangible. Swipe through 2025 highlights below, and hear from five teams about how continued partnership has helped them.
Fast Forward provided transformational fundraising consultations to Lenny Learning, which helped them more than quadruple their budget in 2025 — from $500K to $3M.
Fast Forward worked with Dollar For in 2025 to reshape their AI product and strategy. Their team went on to crush a record $55M in medical debt in the same year.
Following growth planning, Upsolve’s new strategy more than doubled the number of families they reached compared to 2024.
Philanthropic Reset
The conversation around how to fund AI matured in 2025. Fast Forward helped shape that transition through sector-wide guidance, new spaces for alignment, and practical learning for philanthropy.
The Philanthropic Reset whitepaper translated insights into a roadmap for funders. Our Fund.AI conference, hosted in partnership with the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, created space for the sector to move forward together. Fast Forward trained 330 funders on responsible AI and grantmaking across Fund.AI, executive leadership trainings, and tactical AI proposal evaluation workshops.
Funder Resource
The Philanthropic Reset Whitepaper
The Philanthropic Reset turns the insights of the 2025 AI for Humanity Report into a call to action for funders. Co-authored by leaders from Google and Fast Forward, the whitepaper shows how philanthropy can meet this moment — and shaped conversations at UNGA and other global impact summits.
Thought Leadership
“Signals of Readiness”
In a joint piece for the Center for Effective Philanthropy, Shannon Farley and Chantal Forster equipped funders with practical questions for assessing nonprofit AI projects.
Thought Leadership
“Nonprofits are Solving 21st Century Problems—They Need 21st Century Tech”
In Fortune, Maggie Johnson, Head of Google.org, and Shannon Farley call for bold cross-sector investment to ensure nonprofits can harness AI and deliver its benefits to the communities who need them most.
Event
Fund.AI
Hosted by the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation with Fast Forward, Fund.AI marked a shift from curiosity to concrete action on AI in philanthropy. Across two days of candid dialogue, collaboration, and keynotes from sector leaders like Al Gore and Baratunde Thurston, the convening surfaced shared priorities and forged a more unified path forward.
Press
“Nonprofits Are Embracing AI, but Many Struggle to Find Funding”
The Chronicle of Philanthropy highlighted a defining tension of this moment: nonprofits are rapidly adopting AI to grow their impact, yet funding and data constraints threaten to slow progress. Drawing on Fast Forward’s research, the feature underscored both the scale of innovation underway and the urgent role philanthropy must play in sustaining it.
Funder Training
AI Philanthropy Workshops
Fast Forward delivered presentations on how to fund AI for senior leaders across multiple grantmaking organizations. Through these sessions, we equipped executives with the insight and guidance needed to navigate responsible AI adoption.
Partnerships
Partnerships powered progress in 2025. Through Impact Verticals, we teamed up with funders to accelerate tech nonprofits in critical issue areas. These partnerships go beyond funding, wrapping organizations in the support they need to scale. Our Signature Funding Campaigns empowered employees to direct millions of dollars toward tech-driven impact. At Pitch Camp, volunteers shared time, talent, and belief in what these organizations can achieve. Across it all, partnership created real momentum for communities worldwide.
To learn more about how you can get involved, visit our Partner page.
Employee Engagement
Signature Funding Campaigns
Fast Forward’s Signature Campaigns empower employees to direct real funding toward tech nonprofits. Since 2019, flagship efforts like the HPE Foundation’s Accelerating Impact and BlackRock’s Pay It Forward have mobilized more than $11M. In 2025 alone, nearly $2M was distributed, proof that collective employee action can drive meaningful change.
Employee Volunteering
Pitch Camp
Pitch Camp connects tech nonprofits with experts from leading companies to perfect their pitches. In 2025, we hosted Pitch Camp with six partners. The results speak for themselves: 98% of tech nonprofit attendees felt they had a stronger pitch following Pitch Camp.
Impact Vertical
PagerDuty
Together with PagerDuty, we’re backing five innovative AI-powered nonprofits to expand educational access and deliver equitable learning solutions.
Employee Volunteering
Impact Challenges
Impact Challenges engage teams of up to 100 employees to collaboratively brainstorm solutions to real-world challenge statements from select tech nonprofits.
In 2025, we hosted Impact Challenges with three companies — across all sessions, over 130 volunteers generated 225 unique ideas to address these challenges.
Impact Vertical
Lemnis
In 2025, Lemnis supported five AI-powered nonprofits driving innovation in learning through our EdTech Impact Vertical. Fast Forward also joined the Lemnis Alliance, a network of intermediaries advancing education-focused orgs.
Impact Vertical
UPS Foundation
Over the past five years, our partnership with The UPS Foundation has helped scale six tech nonprofits transforming access to healthcare, upward mobility, and refugee support globally.
“As AI reshapes the landscape for social impact, funders and nonprofits are navigating this moment together. The Patrick J. McGovern Foundation’s partnership with Fast Forward helps bring funders and tech nonprofits into closer collaboration. From capacity-building efforts to collaborative initiatives like Fund.AI, we’re working together to support responsible AI adoption and strengthen the broader tech-for-good ecosystem.”Nick Cain, Vice President, Strategy and Innovation, Patrick J. McGovern Foundation
“Our long-standing partnership with Fast Forward reflects Twilio.org's commitment to supporting tech nonprofits with more than only funding. Over the years, we’ve worked together to connect nonprofits with Twilio’s products, people, and expertise, helping them build and scale digital solutions for impact. We’re proud of what this collaboration has made possible and of the innovators we continue to support together.”Erin Reilly, Chief Social Impact Officer, Twilio
“Lemnis is proud to partner with Fast Forward to help edtech nonprofits turn promising ideas into scalable solutions for young learners. Fast Forward's community of innovators are using technology to make learning more personable, adaptable, and just in a fast-moving world."Melissa Johnston, CEO, Lemnis
A Look Forward
In the tech nonprofit community, imagination is alive. Builders are expanding access to healthcare and education, strengthening justice systems, and helping families meet basic needs. They are showing that the real promise of this moment isn’t just smarter tools — it’s a more equitable world.
Thank you for being part of this work. Let’s keep building.
