Fundraise Up co-founder Yuriy Smirnov published a detailed framework on July 29 describing how AI agents will autonomously complete charitable donations on behalf of donors. The framework, which the company calls “Agentic Giving,” covers the full transaction chain from nonprofit discovery through payment execution and post-gift management.
The Brooklyn-based donation platform serves over 3,500 nonprofits and employs more than 350 people, according to its company page. TechCrunch profiled the company in January 2025, noting that co-founders Peter Byrnes, Anton Isaykin, and Smirnov launched the platform in 2017 to replace outdated nonprofit donation forms with e-commerce-style checkout flows.
The Four-Stage Model
Fundraise Up’s framework defines four escalating levels of agent involvement in charitable giving:
Assisted giving, where the agent recommends an organization and opens the correct campaign page. Prepared giving, where the agent pre-fills donation details for donor review. Agent-completed giving, where the donor authorizes the agent to submit the gift through a secure donation service. Ongoing gift management, where the donor asks the agent to change, pause, or cancel a recurring gift.
Each level requires progressively deeper integration between the AI assistant and the nonprofit’s transaction infrastructure.
Nine Verification Steps Before an Agent Can Donate
The framework’s most detailed section outlines nine checks that an agent must resolve before completing a transaction: identifying the correct charitable entity, matching donor intent to an active campaign, confirming amount and frequency, verifying donor identity, selecting a payment method without exposing credentials, obtaining explicit consent on terms, applying fraud and sanctions screening, producing compliant records (receipts, attribution, CRM entries), and establishing post-gift support pathways.
Smirnov’s framework draws a clear boundary between the AI assistant’s role and the payment infrastructure’s role. The assistant handles conversation and intent interpretation. The donation platform handles transaction execution, fund reconciliation, and record-keeping. “The AI assistant should not rebuild this infrastructure,” the framework states. “Its role is to understand the donor’s intent, collect the required choices, request confirmation, and call trusted services that execute the transaction.”
Agentic Finance Beyond Consumer Commerce
The announcement extends the pattern of autonomous financial agents beyond consumer shopping and investment management. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong introduced the Agentic Finance (AiFi) brand earlier this week, built on the x402 protocol for autonomous agent transactions. Fundraise Up’s framework applies similar principles to charitable giving, a sector that processes over $500 billion annually in the United States alone, according to Giving USA.
The governance challenge is identical in both domains: an agent authorized to move money needs identity verification, transaction limits, consent records, and audit trails. Fundraise Up’s nine-step verification chain mirrors the runtime authorization frameworks that companies like Delinea and Neo launched this week for enterprise agent deployments.
For finance leaders at nonprofits, Smirnov sets a specific standard: “An agent-originated donation must be at least as traceable, reconcilable, and supportable as a website donation.”