Volunteering Platform Vee Gets $12M Funding as It Seeks to Help Companies Give Back Better

Tel Aviv-based corporate volunteering platform Vee announces the completion of a $12 million fundraising round, less than a year after it launched its platform. The startup makes it easy for organizations to pursue social responsibility initiatives.

The $12 million new capital infusion was led by State of Mind Ventures. Venture capitals Oryzn Capital, Vertex and Viola Ventures are also part of this round, along with angel investors Amir Shevat of Innovation Endeavors, Eynat Guez of Papaya Global, Guy Shamir of Mivtach Shamir and Joey Low, and Gil Hirsch of StreamElements. Oryzn Capital, Vertex, and Viola Ventures were also investors in Vee’s pre-seed and seed rounds.

In a press statement, Vee Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer May Piamenta cheered the recent funding round, saying “I am excited to see how Vee becomes far more than a product but a global movement of people who want to pay it forward.” Piamenta noted that Vee was built specifically “to give everybody around the world a better way to make social impact.” 

Making volunteering easier

Piamenta, the force behind the conceptualization and implementation of Vee, is no stranger to charity and volunteer work. She spent much of her time doing outreach work since she was in her teenage years in her hometown Dimona in southern Israel. At a young age, she was already involved in various volunteer efforts and even led a global nonprofit project.

These actual experiences exposed Piamenta to the different challenges of doing volunteer and charity work. These inspired her to come up with a platform that makes corporate volunteerism significantly easier with the help of modern technologies. Piamenta says that Vee is meant for all kinds and sizes of teams and organizations in different industries, noting that “this funding round takes Vee to an entirely new level, and the best thing is that we’re just getting started. It’s only a matter of time until Vee will be the benchmark of social good for every company, university, city, and every person, everywhere.”

Piamenta founded Vee together with computer software industry veterans Avi Amor and Gil-Eyal Amasalem. Amor serves as Vee’s COO while Amsalem is the CTO. Both share Piamenta’s passion for social activism, the desire to raise education, and the fondness for community projects.

What makes Vee different

As a volunteering platform, Vee aims to bridge the gap between people and teams that share the spirit of giving back. It also helps nonprofits in sourcing qualified volunteers and achieving their goals with reduced obstacles. The platform can be used to host various volunteering opportunities including animal welfare activities, food aid distribution, environmental awareness and protection, as well as youth mentoring.

“Vee enables HR teams to easily find, coordinate and share charity events, and in effect to build a community for giving back inside the company,” the startup’s press release reads. It provides people and companies an innovative method to advance social and other altruistic ends by automating up to 80 percent of the manual work involved in doing cause-oriented activities. Manual tasks such as the discovery of resources and volunteers, tracking of activities, and the administration of operations are significantly reduced to make initiatives much more efficient and impactful.

What makes Vee different from other similar platforms, however, is its strong emphasis on the abilities and experiences of the employees and teams who want to engage in volunteer work. It seeks to make them considerably more effective and efficient in implementing their plans by facilitating the faster setting up of initiatives and the search and coordination of people to get involved. Vee says that, with the platform’s help, a social project can be established and operationalized within minutes.

Aside from making it easier to organize social projects and attract volunteers, Vee also includes functions that allow team members to keep track and bond over their accomplishments as well as to share experiences with each other. This helps boost team morale and forges camaraderie through the platform instead of or in addition to organizing offline social activities. These make Vee an excellent platform for corporate volunteers who are based in different distant geographic locations.

One of the investors, Yuval Baharav of State of Mind Ventures, praises the idea behind Vee. “I am very excited to have SOMV join the Vee family. For me, this investment is very special as it combines the opportunity to work with a young, bright, super-talented, and ambitious team of founders with the vision of building a company that will not only be a commercial success but also becomes a force for good in the world,” Baharav enthuses.

As a platform created for corporate volunteer teams, Vee simplifies the process of discovering volunteer opportunities that align with the values and capabilities of a team, engaging team members, tracking actions with special analytics tools, and publicizing outcomes and impact. On the other hand, as a nonprofit tool, Vee makes it easy to recruit volunteers for any cause, promote activities and build trusting relationships, and unify or consolidate activities for easier monitoring and management.

At present, Vee already has more than 500 teams and organizations using its platform. These include eBay, Salesforce, Booking.com, and Columbia University. It is already being actively used in 10 countries, logging in hundreds of new activities every week. The startup aims to help corporate volunteers give back with less hurdles and challenges while facilitating better organization and management among nonprofit groups. Vee also seeks to raise the uptake of volunteering on both corporate and personal levels.