How An Apax-backed Tech Provider Is Transforming Charitable Giving

How the Apax’ funds created Bonterra, a category-defining software company serving both nonprofits and corporations at the intersection of technology and philanthropy

• Largest pure-play social good software company in the world.
• Supports nonprofits, case management, funders, and foundations with software solutions to make fundraising and grants management easier. 
• Ambition to help increase total U.S. philanthropic giving from 2.5% of GDP to 3% by 2033.

The social good software market has long been characterised by fragmentation. There have been dozens of specialist providers serving different slices of the nonprofit and corporate giving ecosystem, but few platforms had tried to span the full journey from fundraising through to service delivery and corporate engagement.

When the Apax team began assembling what would become a leading social-sector software business in 2021, the goal was to build a single technology platform capable of connecting every participant in the philanthropic ecosystem, from nonprofits, corporations, and foundations to the millions of donors and volunteers who make social good possible. “

This is a market served by legacy incumbent vendors, with low customer satisfaction, so we decided to build a next generation player,” said Adam Garson, a partner in the Apax technology team. “We were the first private equity firm to identify this thesis and pull off a complicated transaction to make it happen.”

The result was Bonterra, today the largest pure-play social good software company in the world.

"We are software for social good, broadly. What that means is we provide software for nonprofits that help them fundraise, manage their relationships with donors and drive their service delivery. But we also provide software to the folks that fund nonprofits,” explained Scott Brighton, who joined Bonterra as CEO in 2023.

Brighton brings a distinctive combination of deep technology experience and personal connection to the sector. A computer engineering graduate of Bucknell University with an MBA from Duke's Fuqua School of Business, Brighton led a succession of software businesses over two decades.

For Brighton, Bonterra was more than an attractive technology opportunity. His wife, Coleen, is a longstanding nonprofit executive director, and the couple co-founded an education-focused nonprofit foundation in Austin in 2023. The intersection of philanthropy and enterprise software, he says, is both a professional calling and a personal one.

"It sort of struck close to home a little bit because my wife, Coleen, was the longstanding executive director of a nonprofit in Austin,” Brighton said. “Bonterra provides software for nonprofits. So it was sort of a way to connect to a professional and personal passion."

“Scott is both strategic and operationally-minded,” said Garson. “He built out the executive team, drove the development of the cross functional systems needed to run the newly merged entities within Bonterra, and set the long-term vision for the business. The cost efficiencies from integrating the business has unlocked significant margin expansion, which has been – in part – reinvested in product innovation,” Garson added. “This includes the creation of Que, Bonterra’s Agentic AI platform.”

Serving both sides of the philanthropic transaction

On the nonprofit side, Bonterra's solutions span the operational lifecycle.

Its Fundraising and Engagement platform gives organisations of every size the tools to cultivate donor relationships, process donations, and manage campaigns. Its Case Management solutions allow nonprofits and public sector agencies to run programs, track service delivery, and measure outcomes.

Together, these products mean Bonterra can support a nonprofit from its first fundraising campaign through to the reporting of the services it ultimately delivers.

On the corporate side, Bonterra's Strategic Philanthropy platform enables companies to run employee giving and volunteering programmes, manage charitable grants, and build strategic, long-term partnerships with nonprofit partners.

“The software solutions offered are designed to cover all aspects of the social good network,” explained Garson.

Bonterra's scale generates a proprietary data advantage that directly benefits its nonprofit customers. With more than 25 million supporter profiles and 180,000 verified nonprofits in its network, the company facilitates hundreds of thousands of transactions daily, which generate insights that individual organisations could never produce on their own.

One example is Bonterra's Optimised Ask AI offering, which uses behavioural and demographic data to recommend the right donation amount for each individual donor. This yields an average 11% increase in giving for the nonprofits that deploy it.

Technology for the resource constrained

Driving Bonterra’s product development strategy is the realisation that organisations are expected to deliver complex social services while spending as little as possible on administration, effectively operating at the equivalent of an 80% profit margin, as Brighton puts it, in contrast to the 35-40% a lean for-profit company might target.

The result is that even a large nonprofit may have no dedicated IT function, and smaller organisations are entirely dependent on purpose-built software that is intuitive enough to use without specialist support.

Bonterra's product philosophy for nonprofits is shaped directly by this reality. The company supplements its software with educational resources and support that help organisations do more with the tools available, recognising that the technology is only valuable if the team using it can deploy it effectively.

"If you're a small nonprofit, you are resource constrained. That is your dominant existential issue. And so what we have to do for small nonprofits is make our technology incredibly easy to use because they don't have IT organisations to support them,” Brighton said.

Boost philanthropic giving

One of Bonterra's missions is to increase total philanthropic giving in the United States from its current level of approximately 2.5% of GDP to 3% by 2033. The difference, Brighton notes, amounts to more than $570 billion in additional impact every year.

From day one, Bonterra served more than 19,000 customers, had facilitated over $7.4 billion in giving to more than 225,000 nonprofit organisations in the preceding year alone, and counted more than half of the Fortune 100 among its corporate clients. Since then, giving has increased to c.$10bn per year and annual Ebitda has grown four-fold to over $100 million with ambitious growth goals in the coming years.

Under the Apax funds’ ownership and Brighton's leadership, Bonterra continues to grow through a combination of organic product development and targeted acquisition, with further M&A ambitions still to come. This could include new functionality, adjacent markets to those served today, or expansion internationally, Brighton said.

“There are 2 million nonprofits in the U.S., which is a lot,” added Brighton. “Most of them are small and very focused on a specific cause in a specific geography, which is a strength if you can provide technology that enables them to collaborate more effectively, you unlock their potential.”

That’s what Bonterra is about.

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Apax identified a rare build opportunity to acquire leading applications vendors, integrate them, and create an end-to-end platform with the scale to drive genuine systemic change in philanthropy. The acquisitions came in rapid succession:

• In June 2021, Apax acquired CyberGrants, a specialist in corporate social responsibility software that connected around ten million employees with 650,000 nonprofit organisations.
• Two months later, in August 2021, Apax added Social Solutions, a leading provider of case management software for nonprofits and public sector agencies, and EveryAction, a donor and volunteer relationship management platform.
• On 23 March 2022, the combined entity was formally introduced under a single name: Bonterra. The name blends the French word for 'good' (bon) with the Latin word for 'earth' (terra), capturing the company's purpose to generate exponential good with the right foundation.
• More recent acquisitions included Deed, an AI-forward engagement platform designed to connect corporate employees with vetted nonprofits and OneCause, an event fundraising platform.

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Disclaimer

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