How Kindora's Founder Built an AI Fundraising Tool for 328 Nonprofits with Claude Code

Justin Steele spent a decade at a major tech company leading one of its largest philanthropy teams, overseeing nearly $700M in total giving. He understood the funder side deeply: program officers have narrow priorities and only engage with nonprofits squarely in their focus area. Broad outreach is noise. When Steele co-founded Outdoorithm Collective in 2024—a nonprofit connecting urban families with nature—he found himself on the other side of the table with $30,000 left, dwindling fast, and hundreds of families waiting for funded trips.

The prospecting tools he found were either prohibitively expensive or useless. One platform he paid $4,000 for returned 3,000 unfiltered matches. Steele built his own solution using Claude Sonnet: a Python prototype that evaluated funder fit the way a program officer would, eliminating 90% of matches as poor fits and narrowing 3,000 possibilities down to about 75 worth pursuing. He and his wife Sally applied to every one. In the first year, they landed eight grants totaling $100,000—mostly through cold outreach—funding the family trips waiting on their calendar.

Other nonprofit leaders started asking Steele to run matches for them. In April 2025, he co-founded Kindora with Karibu Nyaggah to productize the approach for the thousands of small and mid-sized nonprofits that can't afford enterprise tools or the staff to use them. They hired a developer and started building. Then in July 2025, Steele tried Claude Code. "It just changed everything," he said. "We pushed 10 times more code than before, with fewer errors." The beta launched in August. Fifty nonprofits signed up in the first week; 200 joined by the end of the beta period.

Kindora now runs three Claude models matched to specific jobs. Claude Sonnet 4.6 powers the AI assistant, writes funder outreach, generates deep-research briefs on prospective funders, and drives the agentic deep-search feature that autonomously scores new matches. Haiku 4.5 handles batch processing—classifying user intent, scoring thousands of matches during discovery, and powering the free-tier grant critique tool. Opus 4.6 generates newsletter content where narrative quality matters. Since December, Steele has handled all of Kindora's development himself through Claude Code, shipping features based directly on what users ask for. One night at 9 PM, a user requested a voice tool for practicing fundraising pitches. By 1:30 AM, Steele had built an interactive voice tool that acts as a program officer, asks challenging questions, and analyzes the pitch transcript against a nonprofit sales training curriculum. It was ready to show the next morning.

Kindora now has 328 nonprofits on the platform, with monthly signups doubling from January through March 2026. The company has been accepted into three accelerators—AWS/Deloitte, Blackbaud, and Camelback Ventures—with Camelback providing a $50,000 SAFE Note. In March 2026, the platform piloted an individual donor engagement feature: Claude assessed which people in the founders' network to target, generated the campaign outreach, and raised $101,000 in a single month. Steele sees the moment as urgent: "There's such a unique opportunity right now for people who understand their problem space, who understand their communities. The people who are closest to the problem have the best solutions. This window won't be open forever."