Jed Carlson’s name may be familiar to many throughout the North Carolina startup ecosystem. He was the Founder and CEO of Adwerx until 2022 (GrepBeat previously wrote about him in this capacity) and before that served as Co-Founder and President of ReverbNation. He is currently a Founder in Residence at the Center for Entrepreneurial Development (CED).
Carlson stepped away from his role as CEO of Adwerx in 2022 during a battle with cancer. He is now back in startup mode, however, and launching a new Durham-based company called RoundUp.
Already up and running, this new startup is designed to make it easier for consumers to support nonprofits of their choosing—simply by using their credit cards.
“Almost everyone has been asked by a cashier at the grocery store if they’d like to round up for charity,” Carlson said. “RoundUp takes that familiar idea and applies it to everyday spending by automatically rounding up purchases made on the credit or debit card someone already uses.”
By way of this simple setup, a user can effortlessly become a regular, recurring, and intentional donor. Instead of boosting a given retailer-chosen charity with a single purchase, a user supports an entity of their choosing across all card-based purchases.
The journey to RoundUp
Carlson said that when he began his own cancer journey, he relied heavily on nonprofit organizations such as the American Cancer Society and AIM at Melanoma “for information and support.”
“Seeing the impact those organizations have made me think about how important it is that they have stable, recurring funding.”
That level of funding, however, has not always existed; as Carlson said, charitable giving simply hasn’t evolved very much in recent years.
“Most fundraising still relies on large, one-time donations, while the rest of our lives have shifted to small recurring payments and subscriptions,” he said. “RoundUp applies that same idea [of recurring payments] to philanthropy.”
To turn the idea into a reality, Carlson tapped into his own background and network.
“Over the course of my career I’ve built several companies,” he said, “ including Neighborhood Alerts, which I helped create in partnership with Home Solutions in Raleigh and which grew to about 10 million users in its first 15 months; Adwerx, a marketing platform used by tens of thousands of real estate agents and mortgage professionals across the United States; and ReverbNation, a global platform used by more than five million independent musicians and bands.”
Drawing on this experience, Carlson has put together a “small, elite group of collaborators and contractors” with whom to build RoundUp.
How it works
What Carlson and his collaborators have designed is a tool that works seamlessly with users’ payments. RoundUp connects securely to a chosen credit or debit card and monitors the user’s transactions.
Every time a purchase is made with the connected card, the platform automatically rounds that purchase up to the nearest dollar and puts the amount of the difference toward a donation. So, if you spend $3.75 at a convenience store with a RoundUp-connected card, the $0.25 that would round the purchase up to the nearest dollar goes into, effectively, an accumulating donation pot.
Carlson explained that the startup’s early development revolved as much around security and compliance as the technical aspects of the tool. The RoundUp team “built infrastructure that securely and anonymously integrates with Visa and Mastercard transaction data,” he said, enabling the platform to operate reliably at scale.
The startup has already achieved “Approved Financial Partner” status with Visa and Mastercard—something that took several months’ worth of “technical, security, and compliance reviews” to achieve.
“Both card networks reviewed our product architecture, website, and legal framework before granting approval,“ Carlson said. But with that Approved Financial Partner status granted, RoundUp gained the ability to work with “almost any credit or debit card” in the country.
As for the nonprofits RoundUp users can funnel their donations to, Carlson noted that the platform already includes the entire IRS database of U.S. nonprofits.
“Donors can support almost any nonprofit immediately,” he said.
Launching RoundUp
With the platform built, financial partner status obtained, and access to a vast network of nonprofits in place, RoundUp is fully functional today.
The startup began by piloting with a small number of nonprofits in the Triangle and—while there were early kinks to work out—saw validation early on. Carlson cited a local Montessori school that ran a pilot and saw about 27% of its parents sign up in seven days. This accounted for a significant portion of the school’s expected fundraising for the entire year.
That real-world example speaks to some of the potential Carlson outlined for RoundUp in general.
“A simple rule of thumb,” he said, “is that every 100 donors on RoundUp generates about $30,000 a year in recurring donations for a nonprofit.”
Carlson added that Americans give more than $350 billion a year to nonprofits, but that only some 3% of that total is “automatic and recurring.” If that number grows to even 10%, it amounts to roughly $40 billion more in annual funding for nonprofits.
QUICK BITS
Startup: RoundUp
Founder: Jed Carlson
Founded: 2024
Location: Durham
Website: roundup.org
Funding: Bootstrapped / Friends & Family
This naturally makes the platform appealing from a donor standpoint. To make it equally appealing to donors, Carlson spoke about making the process of using RoundUp “brilliantly simple.”
“We reduced the signup process to about 37 seconds,” he said. “Today, roughly 26% of visitors who reach the signup page convert into donors.”
From there, it’s the ease of doing good that will grow and maintain the user base.
“Most people want to give, but they don’t want to think about it constantly,” Carlson said. “RoundUp lets them support a cause automatically through spare change.”
