UK’s Lightful raises £4 million to help charities go digital

Lightful, a startup developing social media and tech tools for the charity sector, has raised £4 million in Series A funding to expand into a full digital consultancy.

Investors in the organisation include Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason, IndyCar champion Dario Franchitti, and board members Annika Small and Jeffrey Thomas.

Lightful is a single platform on desktop and mobile for charities and social enterprises to manage their social media content and campaigns. It has 1,800 sign-ups on its platform including Comic Relief.

It will be expanding into a full-service digital consultancy called Lightful Services to assist charities in growing their digital presence and complying with regulations, both specific to the sector and related to data protection, such as GDPR. Lightful will also invest the new funds in Lightful Labs, its R&D lab for testing technologies like AI and voice recognition.

The company will continue to push its #ReclaimSocial campaign to highlight positive stories on social media.

“With claims that social media is destroying society and acting as a purveyor of hate speech, there’s clearly a significant opportunity to bring about change,” said Vinay Nair, CEO of Lightful, “and we believe the social impact space has a vital role to play. With the fantastic support from our incredible investors, we’re excited to try to make 2018 the year we can finally reclaim social media – for good.”

According to the company, this is largest funding round for an early-stage tech startup in the charity and social impact sector.

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