Portfolio News: Mobilize Exits to EveryAction

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By Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman and Wes Panek

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NMV was a seed investor in Mobilize, a platform founded after the 2016 elections that helps Democrats and other mission-driven organizations manage events and volunteers. We were always impressed by the care the team took in building their product, and their vision for long-term impact. Early on, Mobilize focused more narrowly on building their tech into existing campaign workflows for effective volunteer, event, and data management. When success followed, like when Democrat Conor Lamb used Mobilize to win the hotly contested March 2018 special election in Pennsylvania, we made a follow-on investment in their Series A in 2019. Now, we’re thrilled to announce that Mobilize has exited to EveryAction, which is a leading software provider for nonprofits.

Mobilize is a case study for NMV’s model of investing in early stage progressive innovation. After our initial investment, Mobilize grew quickly to become a nearly ubiquitous and central platform used by Democratic campaigns to phonebank, text bank, canvass, and more. Just since 2018, Mobilize has powered more than 14 million volunteer actions.

Mobilize now joins a series of other exits on the for-profit side of the NMV portfolio – such as Attentive.ly and Crowdtangle – that demonstrate how mission can coexist with profitable investing in the progressive space. In fact, because we are a mission-driven fund, the returns we make on this exit will all be recycled back into the fund and help us have more capital to make new investments in progressive innovation in 2021. And 2021 will be THE critical year for investing in new startups that can achieve scale in time to impact the 2024 cycle. 

Mobilize’s growth trajectory follows a very familiar pattern we have seen in our decade of political investments at NMV: Progressive innovation takes at least 2–4 years to reach scale. As we wrote about just 6 weeks ago, Mobilize is only one of the startups we invested in in 2016–2018 (which also included Swing Left, the Movement Cooperative, PushBlack, the Center for Tech and Civic Life, and more) that were fundamental to the 2020 elections.  

Following on the heels of yet another tightly contested national election, and with the country in deep turmoil from pandemic, the progressive movement cannot afford any form of stagnation. We must innovate faster and more fundamentally than ever before. We look forward to investing in the next wave of Mobilizes, Swing Lefts, and more next year.