Karen Houghton is a veteran of the Atlanta tech ecosystem. Now, the former partner at investment firm Atlanta Ventures and vice president of the Atlanta Tech Village, a hub for startup founders, has become a CEO and founder herself, raising millions along the way.
Houghton and her co-founder, Connor Ford, have just raised $2 million for their startup, Infinite Giving, the company announced Wednesday.
Infinite Giving is a financial technology platform that helps small and mid-sized nonprofits receive cash and donations of assets like stocks and cryptocurrency, manage reserve funds and conservatively invest their money. The startup is a registered investment adviser, so it helps nonprofits manage funds through brokerage accounts and establishing endowments.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
Houghton’s former employer, Atlanta Ventures, alongside Morgan Stanley and Texas-based venture firm Cubit Capital, led the investment round. David Cummings, founder of ATV and Atlanta Ventures, is on the board of Infinite Giving, and the company was also recently accepted into a Morgan Stanley accelerator.
“It is crucial to have people you respect believe in you,” Houghton told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “I think I had built a long career of pouring into the ecosystem, and I will say it was a very humbling but encouraging moment when a lot of those people and communities that I poured into kind of turned around and supported and poured into me.”
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
Before going into tech, Houghton started a nonprofit and knows the difficulties that come with running tax-exempt organizations. It was that background, coupled with nearly a decade of working with tech founders, that inspired her to launch Infinite Giving in 2021.
“If we can leverage modern financial technology to help have more financially sustainable nonprofits, ultimately the vision is that we have a better world, a better society, because we’re amplifying the impact of the work that they’re already doing,” Houghton said. “We’re just helping them manage what they already have differently.”
For Houghton, the transition from supporting and investing in startup founders to becoming a founder herself is rooted in what she learned and who she met while working for ATV.
“I would never be where I am today if I had not been exposed to the people and the environment and the opportunity at Atlanta Tech Village,” she said.
Houghton met her now co-founder and chief technology officer of Infinite Giving while she was vice president of ATV. Ford participated in an accelerator Houghton had organized for underrepresented founders, and she had advised him while he was part of a different startup. He joined Infinite Giving just months after Houghton took a leap of faith and quit her job to start the company.
But deciding to start a new company took time for Houghton. While at ATV, she tried to help make the tech ecosystem more diverse through accelerators like the one Ford participated in and programs for women. Finally, she said she realized she didn’t have to just facilitate changing the ecosystem, she could be the change, too.
“We need more founders to kind of take that leap of faith into solving these problems that we’re uniquely built to solve. I think that the more we can kind of get into a place where we’re willing to take on that risk, that’s where greatness happens,” she said.
Before Infinite Giving’s latest investment round, Houghton raised $1.6 million through friends and family, angel and pre-seed investors to get the company off the ground. It now has more than 170 customers in 39 states and makes money through three revenue streams: a fee for managing nonprofits’ assets, a subscription fee when organizations use the platform to receive donations and a transaction fee.
With the latest $2 million injection, Houghton plans to hire engineers and work to scale the company through new partnerships. The company currently has eight employees and an office at, where else, ATV.
“Of course,” Houghton said, “I would never go anywhere else.”
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