the start,
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Fundraising agency for charities and NGOs

AI fundraising solutions for charities.

Built to make your team stronger, never to replace it.

Let’s talk

For UK charities raising GBP 500k to GBP 5m.

The whole field, in front of the people who already know what to do with it.

  • Your grant search, already done55k funders on file, before we start on yours.
  • Appeals worth putting a name toPersonalised for each donor, not for the list.
  • Only the people who might say yesCompanies and charities that would back you.
  • A crisis you are ready forAnswered the same day, every time.
Proof tested inside an international NGOYour team is not the experiment.
Checked and approved by you, alwaysYour judgement is the last word.

What does.

Solutions built to work together. You get the ones your charity needs, shaped around the way you already work. No new system, no new process, and nowhere new to log in.

Field Intelligence

Most charities plan the year knowing everything about themselves and almost nothing about anyone else in their field. We solve this problem: board-level answers about anyone in your field, what they raise, who funds them, and who is winning the grants you bid for.

  • How are the budgets of charities like ours changing next year?
  • Where did the charity that grew twice as fast as us get its money?
  • Which funders are quietly leaving our cause?
  • Who is about to start doing what we do?

What arrivesThe field report, ready for your board.

More about Field Intelligence

Grant Applications

The funders everyone has heard of are the ones everyone applies to, because finding the others takes hours a team does not have. We solve this problem: every funder in your field matched against what you do, the long tail as well as the famous names, each application in your own voice, so you are not one more letter on the same desk.

  • Which grants are we missing?
  • Which funders have already funded work like ours?
  • What deadlines are coming that we don’t know about?
  • Why do the same funders keep saying no?

What arrivesGrant applications, ready to send.

More about Grant Applications

Donation Campaigns

As fundraising teams shrink, the messages donors receive get more generic. We solve this problem: no two supporters get the same message, and each one reads as if you sat down and wrote it yourself.

  • Who gave once and was never asked again?
  • Who is quietly drifting away from us?
  • What made them give in the first place?
  • What would a personal message to every single supporter look like?

What arrivesYour campaign and every appeal, ready to send.

More about Donation Campaigns

Corporate and Charity Partners

A partnership ends where it started when only one side’s case was made, whether that is a company that starts to feel like a cash machine or a charity that stops returning the calls. We solve this problem: the companies who would choose you and the charities worth joining forces with, each approached with the case built both ways.

  • Who picks a charity of the year?
  • What could we offer a company so that it wins too?
  • Which charities should we join forces with?
  • Which charities already have the relationships we are trying to build?

What arrivesApproaches to the right partners, ready to send.

More about Corporate and Charity Partners

Emergency Response

An emergency is not one job. It is the emergency grants, the companies who would step in, the charities already working in the crisis and the supporter appeal, all needed on the same morning. We solve this problem: every one of them moving the same day, and the people on the ground reached while it still matters.

  • What has nobody funded in this crisis yet?
  • Which funders actually moved money last time?
  • Who has given to an emergency before and has not been asked for this one?
  • Which organisations are already in this crisis and ready to partner?

What arrivesYour response, ready within hours.

More about Emergency Response

No charity can read its own field from the inside. This is where a strategy starts.

Grant ApplicationsAugust 2026

Understanding why the grants are not successful

Every bid set against 5,700 awards those same funders have actually made. The refusal explains itself, the gap between what they say and what they fund opens up, and the next application has somewhere better to go.

Read the study

Corporate and Charity PartnersSeptember 2026

Charity of the Year for corporate partnerships

Seventy eight partnerships, scored on the nineteen things companies weigh. The list of who to approach, the mechanism that really chooses, and the case that has to be ready before either matters.

Read the study
Redacted editions

The charity’s own figures and the ranked tables are removed, and every removal is marked where it stood.

You know your cause better than anyone. Your field should be no different. Now nothing in it is out of reach.

91% of charities already use AI. Very few will say so. Nobody needs to know how they are getting better, or how fast.

Blackbaud, The Status of UK Fundraising 2026, 9th annual edition.

It will be in their accounts. How it got there does not have to be.

Because we would never give away a secret of yours, anything you would rather a general AI provider never saw, it never sees: that work runs on a local model instead.

Nothing about your cause has changed. The ground under it has, and fast enough to be measured.

Raising the same GBP 100 now costs GBP 9 more than it did in 2021.

What it costs a charity to raise GBP 100
0 40 GBP 30.40 GBP 39.37 2021 2024

Derived from Firetail, Fundraising ROI by cause, 2026: the return per pound spent fell from GBP 3.29 to GBP 2.54 across 159 prominent UK charities over four financial years.

Per cent change over the same four years

The cost of raising money grew four times faster than the money itself. That gap is the whole of it.

Derived from Firetail, Fundraising ROI by cause, 2026.

That is the cost. This is the pressure behind it.

Competition is the single biggest problem, and the doors are closing.

UK trust fundraisers, Gifted survey, 2025. What trust fundraisers say, per cent
82%Competition is their single biggest challenge
78%More funders now refuse unsolicited applications
70%Fewer funders to approach than before

Gifted, 2025 Trusts and Foundations Insights Survey, for all three bars.

Applications to register a new charity hit a record 9,840 in the year to March 2025, up 9 per cent, and the register grew to 170,862. The money those charities chase grew 4 per cent.

Charity Commission registration data and UKGrantmaking.

This is not about how hard your team works. It is about how much of the field you can see.

Why it is called

Because seeing the whole field is not something done once. Grants open, donors move, a partner’s interest appears and passes. The cycle keeps turning, and every turn begins from what the last one learned.

0102030405
  6. 01and back to the first, sharper
01

Analyses

What is open right now: the grants, the donors worth going back to, the companies and charities showing interest, and the strongest way at each

02

Prepares

The strategy, the application, the campaign, written in your name. You are never the one chasing it

03

You approve

Nothing is sent, entered or promised until you have said yes

04

Studies outcomes

Every success and every refusal read for what it says: what landed, what did not, what they actually told you

05

Learns

The loop closes, and the next round opens stronger for it

Every loop leaves your fundraising stronger than it found it.

This is of an organisation becoming stronger.

What arrives, every loop.

  1. Everyone in your field, and what we found on each

    Including the ones we would not go for, and the reason they are still on the list.

  2. Written in your own words, ready for your name

    The application, the appeal, the approach, the board paper, every fact carrying its source.

  3. The record stays yours

    What went out, when, to whom, and what came back.

All of it is your charity’s own work, in your charity’s own words.

Your funders are not the obstacle.

We studied the funders most UK charities apply to, because nobody had, and published every answer.

The 15 funders we studied, and what each one says
What the funder saysFundersWho
6
  • Esmée Fairbairn Foundation
  • Lloyds Bank Foundation for England and Wales
  • Paul Hamlyn Foundation
  • The Henry Smith Charity
  • The National Lottery Community Fund
  • The National Lottery Heritage Fund
1
  • City Bridge Foundation
2
  • The Wellcome Trust
  • UK Research and Innovation
6
  • Arts Council England
  • Comic Relief
  • Garfield Weston Foundation
  • Joseph Rowntree Foundation
  • Sport England
  • Trust for London

The funders’ own published guidance, read September 2026. Not one of them prohibits an AI-assisted application.

Not one of them prohibits an AI-assisted application. Two limit how far it can go, and both of those bar generating the application itself rather than using AI to prepare one.

One of them asks you to name the tools you used, which is a question your supplier has to have answered first.

We studied the suppliers on what they publish about their own AI
11of 19publish nothing at all

A charity cannot declare what its supplier will not disclose. Ours is here.

Our own review of 19 AI suppliers to UK charities, September 2026.

The limit was never your team. It was the time.

Nothing your funders published is in your way. What always has been is simpler than a rule.

A fundraising team has the same week everyone has. Inside it sits every funder who might fund work like yours, every supporter who gave once and could give again, and every company or charity that would partner with you if anyone asked. No week has ever held all three, so one gets worked and two wait.

Today

The fundersworked
The supporterswaits
The partnerswaits

One week

With

The fundersworked
The supportersworked
The partnersworked

One week

Photograph of Marc de Andrés

You already know this feeling. I had it every week.

A charity brought me in for fifteen hours a week. The job was bigger than fifteen hours and they could not afford more of me, so every week I decided which part of it would not get done.

I came from McKinsey, where the work has to land, and from building and training language models. I put them together because it was the only way left to finish what I had been hired to finish.

Meanwhile the industry building AI was selling it as a way to need fewer people. I wanted no part of that. So mine has judgement and reaches a view, it argues for it, and then it waits for yours.

Not fewer fundraisers. The same ones, reaching everything that is out there.

Marc de Andrés.

marc@thestart.agency

People carry the mission. This carries the people.

How much is it?

You pay for the work your charity needs and nothing else, agreed with you before any of it starts. There is no subscription, and nothing renews on you.

Ask for a quote

Everything your board will ask you.

It reads your field, reaches a view on what is worth going after, and drafts from what it finds.

Send anything, agree anything, or speak to a funder. It reaches a view. You take the decision.

Us, and the companies named on our sub-processor list. Not another charity, and not a competitor of yours.

Every claim in a draft carries the source it came from, so you check the source rather than our word.

Fifteen of them are above, with what each one says.

Board’s FAQ

There is one way in, and it is a conversation.

From there, everything is tailored to what your charity actually needs.

Book a call

The work you exist to do gets more behind it.