INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
greatest inequality machine, solving every one of our problems except the ones like housing affordability, education access and healthcare
announced today that it has raised $5 million in new philanthropic funding from leading companies like Google.org, Twilio.org, Blackrock,
the Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Foundation, Okta, PagerDuty, AWS, GitHub and many more.Like traditional accelerators such as Y
Combinator, Fast Forward selects a batch of very early-stage startups working on large social challenges and helps them scale their
products, culminating in a series of three demo days in SF, Silicon Valley and New York City
the last time we checked in, co-founders Shannon Farley and Kevin Barenblat explained to me that an emerging pattern is the depth of
engagement from tech workers
She said that when they started, they only had support from a couple of groups like Google and Blackrock, but that the list now includes
more than 40 tech companies.As those companies have invested more resources into Fast Forward, company employees are also engaging more
of a company-wide philanthropic initiative; 31 tech nonprofits received funding as part of the HPE Accelerating Impact program.Barenblat
explained that as a nonprofit accelerator, they can take a much broader role in building out this particular niche
prep exercises; FreeFrom, which helps domestic violence survivors get access to compensation; and Hikma Health, a health management platform
in targeting hard challenges to get started.As these startups grow, Barenblat hopes that more tech employees will get personally involved in
philanthropy because the startups will look and feel familiar but are solving tough social challenges
next batch of startups into household names
Fast Forward wants the next generation of tech nonprofits to reach that level of stature.With some effort, the tech and product thinking
