Moshe Hecht Raised $1.5 Million For New Start-Up

By COLlive reporter

Entrepreneur Moshe Hecht is behind the groundbreaking new data-analysis tool Hatch AI which uses machine learning and predictive modeling to identify strong constituents and predict donor behavior for non-profit organizations and charities.

He raised $1.5 million in pre-seed funds from angel investors and tech leaders, such as computer scientist and philanthropist David Magerman, venture capitalist and philanthropist Howard Morgan, Tiferes Ventures (Clark Valberg of InVision), Avi Geller (Leonite Capital), Daniel Cotlar, Jonathan Zauderer, Mallion Holdings LLC (Esriel Rappaport), Rochel Leah Bernstein, Levy Lieberman, Meir Gniwisch (Olive Tree Ventures) and Israel Schachter (Charity Bids).

After completing the successful funding round, Hatch is opening its private beta to 100 organizations. Hecht, CEO and founder of Hatch, was interviewed to COLlive.com about his brainchild.

COLlive: Tell us about your journey from music to Charidy.com and now Hatch.

Hecht: Music will always be my first passion. But, in my late 20s, I discovered a close second―using technology and innovation to help the people who are helping others. Finding Charidy was like realizing a new calling. My time there was fantastic, and I feel so lucky to have worked with such amazing people and causes during those seven years. With Hatch, I found a new way to help these organizations beyond an annual campaign. My focus now is long-term sustainability and growth through a new kind of technology.

Tell us more about that. How did Hatch, well, hatch?

When I was working on campaigns, I got to help organizations once a year. They did incredibly well, but it was an annual, impulsive giving event. That left me thinking, what about the rest of the year? You have to engage donors then, too. After all that confetti settled, these organizations were sitting on tons of data about donors they’d collected during their campaign. But there was no tool to curate, categorize and interpret it in a really clear and accessible way. As a result, it wasn’t being monetized. Hatch solves this problem.

Would you call it a competitor to Charidy.com?

Not at all. In fact, it works very well in tandem with Charidy-style campaigns. For example, Hatch can help identify ideal matchers and ambassadors with large networks you may not be aware of in your community. People who maybe gave $18 five years ago, but can now give $18,000. Hatch was created to help find those key people who can propel your brand and funding forward. In the future, It will also help with donor segmentation, helping divide those crowdfunding emails so that they’re not all bunched into the same category. This helps curb donor burnout. A problem our community knows about all too well.

How does it work?

In simple terms, most organizations today have, on average, about 10 pieces of information on their constituents. Name, address, email, phone number, some donation history, event attendance―very basic stuff. What we’ve done at Hatch is to curate hundreds of pieces of information from multiple public sources. We’re now giving organizations access to that information in a really curated, centralized, and intuitive way. This is no boring Excel spreadsheet. This is an accessible, easy-to-implement way of understanding what makes your people what we like to call: tick, click and give. Hatch ranks your people using a combination of wealth and social influence so you can find your strongest supporters. We’re also building predictive algorithms to help organizations learn about the kind of interests donors have. This helps them identify both individuals and groups who’d be most likely to join a peer-to-peer challenge―based on activities they actually enjoy.

Where does all that information come from?

Ethical data sourcing practices are really important to all of us at Hatch. In the last 1.5 years, we’ve developed a pipeline of data sourced from dozens of data streams. All of it is sourced from exclusively licensed or publicly available locations following all legal parameters of the US and Europe.

This all sounds very complex. What kind of help have you had along the way?

I’ve had a lot of help primarily from my partner, Eyal Beigman, a PhD mathematician who’s been developing AI products for the past 20 years. As well as from our team of Data Engineers. We’ve also been pretty blessed with our incredible investors―many of whom are extremely prominent. It’s actually been kind of humbling that they believed in me, our team, and the potential of the product. Lastly (and quite obviously), we’ve had a lot of help from the organizations working with us in our private beta stage as we test the product.

Do you have any competition?

Most of our competition lies in wealth-screening companies. Our differentiator is that we’re not just focused on the rich. We’re more egalitarian than that. Hatch finds the potential in every person, no matter how rich they are, whether in donating, promoting, or volunteering. We give everyone within a donor database the chance to get involved. This is especially important today, as peer-to-peer fundraising is key to propelling campaigns to hundreds of millions of dollars. We see over and over that modern philanthropy is driven by modest givers inspiring other modest givers in their networks. Those donations, if harnessed properly, are just as critical as mega-gifts.

What’s your message for today’s young go-getters in Chabad who have an entrepreneurial spirit?

There are many ways to do shlichus beyond a pulpit position. Because, let’s face it, those positions are getting harder to find. Even though I’m not leading a community, I’m still on shlichus. Hatch is all part of that. You just have to dig deep into your talents and find opportunities that can actualize them in a way of bringing the Rebbe’s message to life, and you know, make the world a dwelling place for the big boss.

How does one join?

We’re currently hosting a private beta cohort that we’re opening up to 100 organizations. The qualifications they need to have are over 2000 donors in their database and have been operating for more than 5 years. To apply, visit www.hatch.ai