Seems they are growing well. They already have pretty good name recognition. It doesn’t seem like a high resource business, unlike video hosting, and they already have a good monetization strategy (they basically take 2.9% of donations). Given that they are pretty close to a billion dollars a year, that would be close to $29 million/year.
Given all this, what is the purpose of raising more money at this time. They already have good name recognition, and should be turning a profit by now.
Sometimes, too much funding can end up being a curse, where the business loses focus on their core competency and tries to branch out too much.
EDIT:
Thanks to the commenters below, It looks like they take somewhere between 5 - 12% of donations. That is on top of the 2.9% processing fee. So it looks like they they could easily bring in between $50-100 million/year with the $1 Billion/year in donations that they are pretty close to bringing in(depending on the mix of plans people sign up for). This further reinforces the point that they have a pretty good monetization strategy.
But $29M/year I isn’t that much. Especially as they’re located in San Francisco and have about 200 employees (pretty sure not all are there). That gives you $145k per employee. That’s roughly enough to cover salaries, assuming no other cost to run the business.
My question is WTF are those 200 people doing considering the main product of the company is an automated process and the code has already been written & tested over the previous years?
Running business requires people. Accounting, support, marketing, hr, security, procurement teams, lawyers, fraud teams, etc, etc. To build tech company you require more than just engineers.
Given all this, what is the purpose of raising more money at this time. They already have good name recognition, and should be turning a profit by now.
Sometimes, too much funding can end up being a curse, where the business loses focus on their core competency and tries to branch out too much.
EDIT:
Thanks to the commenters below, It looks like they take somewhere between 5 - 12% of donations. That is on top of the 2.9% processing fee. So it looks like they they could easily bring in between $50-100 million/year with the $1 Billion/year in donations that they are pretty close to bringing in(depending on the mix of plans people sign up for). This further reinforces the point that they have a pretty good monetization strategy.