Durham-based NeedsList has been making waves since its founding in 2016 by Natasha Freidus and Amanda Levison. What once started as a B2C “registry for humanitarian aid” for Syrian refugees has evolved into the B2B worldwide crisis response platform it is now, serving communities from across 25 countries and delivering more than $20 million of aid.
And now its reach will expand even further and wider, after its just-announced acquisition by Portland, Oregon-based Armillaria, a technology company dedicated to advancing positive social, environmental and economic change through digital infrastructure.
While Levinson and Freidus will leave NeedsList in the good hands of Armillaria, they are excited with the partnership they’ve formed to uniquely address the complex challenges and needs facing the tech-for-good sector.
“[The exit] just made so much sense to me,” Freidus said. “One of the aspects of this acquisition that’s super-exciting is the fact that [NeedsList] will be one software in a larger suite of tools around impact because it just makes much more sense. If tech for impact really wants to explode and become prominent, we need to think about ways to integrate both from a partnership standpoint and on a backend infrastructure.”
Armillaria believes that its acquisition of NeedsList marks a significant milestone in leveraging tech for the greater good. According to today’s press release announcing the deal, NeedsList’s innovative approach to addressing urgent crisis response needs aligns with Armillaria’s mission to enact positive change through digital solutions at unprecedented scales.
“At Armillaria, we believe that contemporary digital technologies are the most effective and efficient medium for transforming lives and driving positive change on a global scale,” said Cameron Burgess, Armillaria’s CEO, in the release. “Rather than prioritizing incentives for new ventures and novel technologies, we must adopt and adapt what’s already working in order to significantly increase the speed and scale at which we can collectively create change. Our acquisition of NeedsList’s groundbreaking software is intended to continue to move upstream from crisis response to crisis resilience.”
The NeedsList software empowers organizations around the world to identify and address urgent needs, creating a more responsive and collaborative ecosystem for crisis response.
In its initial conception, NeedsList connected nonprofits with specific needs to individual donors and people that could provide them, whether it was cash or donated items. After working with local disaster response organizations to leverage the software, Levinson learned that what organizations needed most was the accessibility to fulfill their needs as well as being able to see other offers.
Therefore, in 2018, the company pivoted its mission to match organizations together—those that have a need and those offering those services and resources. And its pivot pushed its success even further, as NeedsList has been backed by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and has received support from Google.org, which provided the startup a $1 million grant and pro bono technological support.
This money and support allowed NeedsList to upgrade and roll out a free version of its platform and software to countries in need, first in Ukraine, then in Uganda, Kenya, Somalia, Peru and Colombia. Since its launch in Ukraine, NeedsList software has been able to provide people with blankets, stoves, generators and more.
Now, with its acquisition by Armillaria, NeedsList will be able to expand its global reach to even more countries and communities, while fast-tracking Armillaria’s development of its own innovative solutions to better address complex global challenges.
Levinson said that the problems NeedsList is trying to solve of “how can we effectively move resources to local communities during times of crisis?” can’t be efficiently scaled by a small startup. With this acquisition, the possibilities for NeedsList’s software can open even further to expand its impact and reach even more communities in need.
