ImpactAlpha, November 21 — Brooklyn-based Beam has raised $6.4 million in a Series A round from investors including including Potencia Ventures, Spring Point Partners, Lumina Impact Ventures, Schmidt Futures, Imaginable Futures and the American Family Insurance Institute for Corporate and Social Impact.
Beam launched in 2016 as Edquity to help educational institutions identify at-risk students and provide cash assistance for unexpected expenses, housing or food. The company rebranded to help low-income families in the U.S. access government assistance.
“Our expansion into governments is the most genuine way to bring about the impact we’re trying to see in the world,” Beam’s David Helene told ImpactAlpha. “We realized we could apply our technology to government programs to get critical services to the most vulnerable people.”
How it works: Beam’s platform lets constituents submit documents for rental relief, public utility benefits and emergency cash assistance. Helene said the platform helps governments “around the application, identity verification, decisioning and embedded payment, so that there’s no fragmentation between processing and payments.”
Public assistance
Beam says it has administered $180 million in public assistance funds to approximately 300,000 households in the U.S. since the start of the Covid pandemic in 2020.
With the Series A funding, Helene said, “We’re trying to help governments create a ‘No Wrong Door’ approach where we can bring intelligence to these programs and help constituents apply simply once to make sure that they can get enrolled in these critical services at the time that they need it.”
Beam is “a prime example of the transformational solutions we seek to fund as part of our goal to advance economic justice,” said Spring Point’s Margot Kane. Each year, low-income Americans fail to collect tens of billions of dollars of government aid due to complex application requirements.
