Zeffy Grew 30x in 3 Years After a VC Passed: François de Kerret's One-and-Done Playbook
September 28, 2026
TL;DR: Zeffy is a 100% free fundraising and donor-management platform for nonprofits. It makes zero dollars from platform fees, transaction fees, or credit card fees — its entire revenue comes from optional tips donors choose to leave. It was co-founded by François de Kerret (CEO) and Thibaut Jaurou (CTO) in Montreal, originally as a volunteer-matching marketplace, before three pivots led them to the tip-based model in September 2018. Pablo Srugo, host of The Product Market Fit Show, met François three years before this episode while Zeffy was raising its roughly $3.5 million seed round at under $1 million in revenue — and passed. As Pablo frames it in the episode, Zeffy then grew 30x in three years into eight-figure revenue, without ever raising another round. As of March 2026, Zeffy says it has helped more than 100,000 nonprofits raise over $2 billion with $0 in fees.
What does Zeffy do?
Zeffy is a fundraising platform built only for nonprofits — donation forms, ticketed events, peer-to-peer campaigns, recurring giving, a donor CRM, and an in-person tap-to-pay app. Every one of those tools is free to the nonprofit: no subscription, no percentage of what's raised, no card-processing fee passed through.
The company survives entirely on optional tips. When a donor gives to a nonprofit through Zeffy's checkout, they're asked if they'd also like to leave a small voluntary contribution to Zeffy itself. Most nonprofits using the platform are small and volunteer-run, which is exactly who François built for.
"Making it simple is now super important." — François de Kerret, Zeffy
That line comes from his explanation of who actually uses the product: not professional fundraisers, but volunteers doing the setup at night after their day jobs. The whole product is designed around the assumption that the user has never used fundraising software before and doesn't want to learn one.
Key stat: As of the episode taping, Zeffy worked with 30,000 nonprofits, up from roughly 10 in its first month — a number François gave directly on the show.
Who founded Zeffy?
Zeffy was founded in Montreal in 2016 (originally under the name Simplyk) by François de Kerret (CEO) and Thibaut Jaurou (CTO), a full-stack developer and graduate of Arts et Métiers ParisTech and Polytechnique Montréal, as reported by Made in CA and Social Impact Heroes.
The company did not start as a donation platform. As François laid out on the show, it went through three distinct businesses first: a marketplace matching volunteers to nonprofit opportunities, then a version sold to schools, then one sold to large corporations for employee volunteering programs. By September 2018, growth on the corporate side had stalled.
"We have one corporate client, maybe 30 schools. what's coming up is not really exciting." — François de Kerret, Zeffy
That's when the two co-founders went to a lake house north of Montreal to decide whether to shut down. They'd heard of a tip-funded donation platform in Europe and reasoned that if free, tip-based giving worked for a one-euro tip on a 200-euro restaurant bill, it would work for donations in Quebec and the U.S. too. Thibaut built the first version — a Stripe-powered donation module bolted onto their existing volunteering platform — in three weeks.
"We said, let's make sure we raise 50K before Christmas for non-profits or we stop. It was our challenge." — François de Kerret, Zeffy
They hit that bar, but barely: after calling roughly a thousand nonprofits in their existing network, only about 10 signed up in the first month. François attributes even that sliver of traction to trust the company had already earned through its volunteering product — trust that was tested almost immediately when the platform's recurring-donation feature broke on its very first use, and they had to personally call the donor to redo it.
How much has Zeffy raised?
- Pre-seed: roughly $750,000, raised in 2019 from Anges Québec and early-stage VCs — as François discussed on the show — to fund early sales hires and rebuild the platform from its school/volunteering-era codebase into a dedicated donation product.
- Seed: roughly $3.5 million, closed in November 2021 — the same round Pablo passed on. Public funding trackers (Crunchbase, PitchBook, Tracxn) list a Zeffy seed round of this size closing that month, with investors including 10X Capital, Ring Capital, Panache Ventures, Dispatch Ventures, Gaingels, LeFonds and Middle Cove Capital.
- Since then: no further funding round, as of September 2026 — confirmed by checking Crunchbase, PitchBook and Tracxn, none of which list any Zeffy round after November 2021. That's five years on a single seed check, by design (more on why below).
The pitch Pablo passed on
Pablo met François roughly three years before this interview, while Zeffy was raising that $3.5 million seed round. At the time, per the episode's framing, Zeffy was under $1 million in annual revenue. Pablo passed.
What makes the miss sting is what was actually happening underneath that revenue number. Growth had been 10x-per-year since the pivot — easy math when starting from near zero, but real. By July 2021, three years into the tip model, Zeffy had processed about $2 million in cumulative donations and was doing $30,000–$40,000 a month in net revenue — under $500,000 a year.
"I also think what's different between Zeffy and maybe other competitors or fundraising platforms is really the talent density." — François de Kerret, Zeffy
But the raise itself was a near-failure. Growth was decelerating because Zeffy's entire go-to-market at the time was outbound sales — cold-calling nonprofits — and that motion was breaking. Professional sales reps hired from other startups quit within months, calling the flat, non-negotiable commission structure "nonsense." Investors wanted a detailed U.S. sales plan Zeffy couldn't credibly produce. So the founders paused the raise for two weeks, opened a U.S. entity through Stripe Atlas, signed two nonprofits who were friends of friends, and came back with just enough proof of U.S. traction to close the round.
Then the U.S. sales push itself failed just as hard.
"It was terrible, but someone in marketing joined Zeffy and started to run this Google Ads." — François de Kerret, Zeffy
Within six months, that hire was bringing in roughly 10 times more nonprofits than before, according to François's account on the show. That single hire is the actual inflection point of the company, and it happened after the money Pablo declined to put in was already in the bank.
How Zeffy found its real growth channel
The keywords that worked were blunt: "fundraising platform for nonprofits," and "grants for nonprofits" — searches a volunteer treasurer types into Google when their board tells them to find a free way to collect donations. No sales call required.
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Subscribe to The PMF Show"Fundraising platform for nonprofits, even grants for nonprofits." — François de Kerret, Zeffy
Once that channel proved out, Zeffy scaled Google Ads spend from $5,000 a month to $500,000 a month over the following three years, and rebuilt the company around marketing- and product-led growth rather than sales.
"So simple. And so we switched our entire organization to marketing led products." — François de Kerret, Zeffy
The irony François is candid about: the sales-led motion had been chasing the wrong customer. Sales reps were pushing to land the largest nonprofits, negotiating "contracts" for an organization that would never have a contract value, because a donation platform's revenue depends entirely on how much the nonprofit's own donors choose to tip. The long tail of small, volunteer-run nonprofits — the ones a self-serve signup and a simple product were built for — had been sitting there the whole time, reachable with a search ad instead of a cold call.
On why competitors haven't simply copied the free model since: François points to structural lock-in, not a lack of imagination.
"First is other fundraising platforms that are structured with higher costs and sales motion. They have higher margin on each non-profit... they are bit addicted to this margin." — François de Kerret, Zeffy
A platform already running a sales org and charging a percentage of every dollar raised can't switch to $0 fees without gutting its own P&L. Zeffy never had that revenue line to defend.
On why the company hasn't raised since 2021 despite growing profitably at 200% a year, François rejects the standard "raise money while you don't need it, for the buffer" advice:
"You spend a lot of time raising money and not focusing on growth. And second, you're putting someone new in the table and the board." — François de Kerret, Zeffy
And on capital he doesn't have a clear use for:
"If we had 10 million today, I'm not sure we would use it very wisely and it wouldn't be a game changer." — François de Kerret, Zeffy
Key lessons from François de Kerret's playbook
1. A cold-call sales motion can hide the actual product-market fit. Zeffy's sales team was landing customers, but chasing the wrong segment — large nonprofits it had to negotiate with — while a much bigger, easier-to-reach long tail waited for a self-serve signup form. Revenue growth alone didn't reveal the mismatch; a single Google Ads hire did. 2. Structural cost lock-in is a real moat. Incumbent fundraising platforms can't match a $0-fee price without abandoning the margin their whole business model depends on. That's a harder wall for a competitor to tear down than a feature gap. 3. Revenue doesn't equal product-market fit — patience does. François points to nonprofits sticking around through early bugs on a barely-built product as the real signal, more than any dollar figure. 4. Raise only what has a clear job. François treats an oversized raise "just in case" as adding two new problems — founder time spent fundraising instead of building, and a new board member who may not fit — to solve a risk that may not exist. 5. Hire for ceiling, not résumé, especially at junior levels. Zeffy deliberately hires people with less relevant experience into roles that will stretch them, prioritizing potential and drive over having "done the job already." 6. Model your way to profitability on a fixed timeline. François's own regret is that Zeffy didn't hit its profitability target as fast as it could have; his advice to other one-and-done founders is to do the math seriously on becoming profitable 18 months after the raise, not just hope volume gets there.
"I would do quite seriously the math of how do I become profitable 18 months after my run?" — François de Kerret, Zeffy
"I understood it was it because our product was almost, well, inexistent at first and really, really simple. And it would amaze me that they were excited by something so simple." — François de Kerret, Zeffy
FAQ: Zeffy
Q: What is Zeffy? A: Zeffy is a 100% free fundraising and donor-management platform built specifically for nonprofits — donation forms, event ticketing, recurring giving, a CRM and a tap-to-pay app — with no platform, transaction, or credit-card fees passed to the nonprofit. It funds itself through optional tips left by individual donors.
Q: Who founded Zeffy, and when? A: François de Kerret (CEO) and Thibaut Jaurou (CTO) founded the company in Montreal in 2016, originally as a volunteer-matching marketplace called Simplyk. It pivoted to schools, then corporate volunteering, before becoming the tip-funded donation platform known as Zeffy in September 2018.
Q: How much funding has Zeffy raised? A: Roughly $750,000 in a 2019 pre-seed round, followed by a roughly $3.5 million seed round that closed in November 2021. As of September 2026, public funding trackers show no further round since — the company has funded its growth from profitability instead.
Q: How is Zeffy free — where does its revenue come from? A: Entirely from optional donor tips. When someone donates to a nonprofit through Zeffy's checkout, they can choose to add a voluntary contribution to Zeffy; nonprofits keep 100% of what they raise.
Q: How big is Zeffy today? A: As of March 2026, Zeffy reports serving more than 100,000 nonprofits that have collectively raised over $2 billion on the platform, up from the $1 billion milestone it announced in May 2025.
Sources: Listen to the Full Founder Story
- François de Kerret, Co-Founder & CEO of Zeffy — turned a free, tip-funded donation platform into an eight-figure-revenue, profitable business without raising money since 2021, after three earlier pivots and a VC pass that missed the whole run.
For related stories on founders who found their real growth channel after early misses, see how Perkbox survived multiple pivots to a $170M exit, how Retention.com bootstrapped to $25M ARR and $14M in profit, how Gusto turned a $6M seed into $1B+ in revenue, and how Suger reached $2M ARR with a five-person team.
Listen to the full episode at pmf.show for the complete story.
Last updated: September 2026
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