Helping NGOs find donors. How the Ukrainian startup Kweet was created
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In our recurring Who Are These People segment, Vector offers founders an opportunity to discuss their projects, covering aspects such as their products, marketing strategies, monetisation, investments, and plans. The focus this time is on Kweet, a Ukrainian startup. Their solution is a web-based chatbot designed to help non-governmental organisations secure new donors and maximise efficiency by using a prompt library tailored for marketing, fundraising, communications, and brainstorming sessions.
Vector’s editor-in-chief Yuliia Tkach interviewed Maia Iva, CEO and co-founder, about the product’s features, promotion, investments, and plans.
Conception
Kweet has two co-founders:
- Maia Iva, CEO. UX/UI designer and consultant with over eight years of expertise in marketing and communications for the charity sector.
- Illia Tainovych, CTO. He is a full-stack developer with 10 years of experience, over eight of them focused on the charity sector.
Maia and Illia share a personal and professional partnership. After moving from Kyiv to Berlin in 2018, they launched NO BORDERS, a design and development studio.
Following their studies in Sophia Amoruso’s Business Class in 2020, they defined a mission, as Maia explains, and commenced work exclusively for non-profit organisations and social enterprises: “Through our collaboration with more than 50 charities, we gained insight into donor behaviour patterns and conducted extensive UX experimentation for digital fundraising. My work shifted to advising organisations on marketing aimed at acquiring new donors and corporate sponsorships”.
Following the full-scale invasion, their studio was paused as they concentrated on collecting humanitarian aid and became active participants in Ukrainian animal rights initiatives. Later, they launched Petners, a charity organisation for animal evacuation. In the three months between March and May 2022, they pivoted to aid distribution, supplying animal food and medicine to shelters and volunteers, with a focus on frontline regions.
Kweet began as an internal tool for Petners: “We needed assistance with creating donor-centric content,” Maia explains. In July 2024, the co-founders closed NO BORDERS to focus their efforts on developing Kweet.
The co-founders are currently the sole members of the team: Illia focuses on product architecture, and Maia handles design, marketing, sales, and customer experience.
Product and audience
Kweet is a web-based chatbot designed to help non-governmental organisations secure new donors and maximise efficiency by using a prompt library tailored for marketing, fundraising, communications, and brainstorming sessions.
Maia explains: “We have been experimenting with Chapgpt, Claude, and similar assistants since the end of 2022, but their focus remains on the psychology of consumerism rather than philanthropy. While these instruments perform well for profitable enterprises and businesses, they lack the comprehension required to motivate charitable behaviour.”
Kweet’s architecture is grounded in donor psychology and established philanthropy patterns. What motivates people to donate? How can different donor archetypes be used for successful fundraising? For social media to be effective, non-profit organisations are required to produce a large volume of content that is donor-focused, motivational, and contains explicit calls to action.
Kweet addresses this need, covering tasks ranging from developing full marketing campaigns and new audience acquisition strategies to writing partnership proposals, reports, presentations, and content for social media.
We conducted a pilot study with five organisations across the USA, Mexico, Germany, Spain, and Ukraine, each with an annual budget of up to $9 million. The pilot confirmed that Kweet reduces the time spent writing content and emails by 80%, allowing teams to focus on building relationships with donors and partners.”
Kweet is in the soft-launch stage and, according to the co-founder, is already generating revenue, although the exact amount has not been disclosed. They are also keeping the number of active users confidential.
She continues: “As we are both sector insiders and outsiders, our accumulated expertise and consistent communication through LinkedIn drive 90% of the interest in Kweet.
While Kweet currently supports communication strategies and writing, our ambitions are high: we are developing an AI-powered development tool for the charity sector. Our plans involve many complementary tools that remain under wraps for now. Crucially, the implementation of agentic AI will enable Kweet to transform into an autonomous team component.
The target users of Kweet are the marketing, communications, and fundraising teams within charitable organisations. With various missions and budgets, these teams are primarily based in the USA.
Business model
Operating as a B2B SaaS, Kweet has a subscription model based on the number of users: it costs $1,200 per year for two users, $2,400 per year for four, and increases proportionally.
The team plans to introduce flexible pricing based on the size of the organisation: “This way, smaller charities will be able to afford Kweet through effective subsidies from the larger organisations paying the full price. It will mean lower profit margins for us, but it aligns with our mission.”
Investments
The founders are not disclosing how much capital has been invested in development or whether outside angel funding has been involved. In Maia’s words, all core processes — research, product design and development, marketing, and sales — are handled in-house.
The team is cautious about seeking venture funding at this stage: “We are deliberately taking our time to cultivate relationships with investors who are specifically interested in our industry (non-profit tech, AI for good). It is paramount that Kweet’s core purpose always stays focused on growing the charity sector.”
Plans
“We are currently working on a crucial feature — the ability to select a ‘persona’. While Kweet is donor-centric, this approach is not always ideal — for example, when writing a grant report. For this purpose, the persona is the grant-maker, and entirely different psychological patterns apply. We are integrating multiple personas beyond just the donor to significantly increase Kweet’s flexibility.
Our overarching goal is to build a product that becomes an essential growth tool for charities around the world,” the co-founder concluded.
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