How a tide of tech money is transforming charity

When Andrew White first sold a chunk of his business in 2021, he knew he wanted to give some of the proceeds away. Indeed, if all goes according to plan, he hopes eventually to give over $20m to charity. But Mr White was still busy running FundApps, a compliance-monitoring service for investors. That left little time to read up on development economics or scour charity rankings.

The model that big-name philanthropists have followed for generations—setting up a private foundation and hiring a team to run it—was out of the question. “Creating another organisation to manage your money is just wasting it,” says Mr White. After all, he says, “these people are very good at what they do, so why don’t you trust them to do it?” In the end, Mr White gave the money to Founders Pledge, a British charity with more than 1,700 members in 39 countries. He told Founders Pledge he would like the cash to go to education and poverty relief in poor countries, then left its researchers to sort out the details.