The first thing you see on Omaze.com is a house. Not a logo, not a mission statement, not a video loop of grateful beneficiaries. A house. On a recent visit it was a multimillion-dollar place in Miami, photographed in that golden-hour real-estate light that makes you forget you have a job. Scroll, and the fine print quietly offers a $1.8 million cash alternative paid in twelve monthly installments [Omaze]. The donation ask comes later, almost as an afterthought, which is precisely the trick.
That trick, dressed up in better photography and tighter checkout flows than most nonprofits can muster, is the bet Omaze has been refining since 2012. Co-founders Matt Pohlson and Ryan Cummins built the Culver City company on a simple inversion of the charity pitch [TechCrunch, July 2015]: lead with the prize, route the proceeds to a vetted nonprofit, and let the dopamine of a possible Maserati or Swiss vacation do the persuasive work that a direct-mail appeal never quite manages. Today the catalog ranges from a sold-out PlayStation 5 donated by an actor to an eight-day Switzerland itinerary with first-class rail and English-speaking guides [Omaze]. Each campaign is yoked to a specific cause, from SurfAid's clean-water work in remote Pacific communities to wedding-gifting nonprofit BAA [Omaze].
The bet
What Omaze actually sells is conversion. A nonprofit on its own struggles to make a stranger care; Omaze wraps the ask inside an entertainment product, takes a cut of entries, and hands the rest to the partner charity. The company describes itself, accurately, as "an entertainment company with a social purpose" [Omaze]. Greenhouse job postings put cumulative giving at more than $150 million across 350 charity partners [Greenhouse, 2026], a figure that lines up with the $130 million Pohlson cited on the Art of the Hustle podcast and the "hundreds of millions" the company claims on its own checkout page [Omaze]. The wedge is that the platform handles everything a nonprofit cannot: the prize sourcing, the legal sweepstakes machinery, the performance marketing, the winner-reveal videos that generate the next campaign's organic reach.
Why it could be big
The investor list reads like people who understand consumer attention as a commodity. FirstMark Capital led the $9 million Series A in 2015 [Business Wire, July 2015]. The Series B brought $30 million in August 2020 as the company expanded beyond the celebrity-experience format that defined its early years [TechCrunch, August 2020]. Then in October 2021, Moore Strategic Ventures led an $85 million Series C [PRNewswire, October 2021], with Tornante Company (Michael Eisner's investment vehicle), Vayner/RSE, Telstra Ventures, and BDMI on the cap table.
Series A 2015 | 9 | $M
Series B 2020 | 30 | $M
Series C 2021 | 85 | $M
The ambition Pohlson articulated to Forbes in late 2020 was to raise a billion dollars annually for good causes [Forbes, November 2020], a number that sounds outlandish until you remember that the global charitable-giving pool is measured in the hundreds of billions and that most of it still moves through channels that look and feel like 1994. If even a sliver of donors prefers a sweepstakes mechanic to a gala or a direct-debit form, Omaze's slice of the take is large. The expansion into the UK and Germany [Omaze] suggests management sees the model as geography-portable, and the UK in particular has a mature prize-draw culture that the company has leaned into with luxury-home campaigns.
The team and traction
Matt Pohlson remains co-founder and CEO [Comparably; Growjo]. His own story (a near-death experience he later credited with reshaping his views on optimism and purpose) became part of the company's public narrative through a 2020 Forbes profile [Forbes, November 2020]. Ryan Cummins co-founded the company alongside him [TechCrunch, July 2015]. The leadership page notes a new hire named Tim joining in 2025 to lead the next phase of global growth [Omaze]. Open roles on Greenhouse and Ashby span a Mobile Engineering Lead, a Data Engineer, a Director of Business Development, and a CRM Manager covering maternity leave, a hiring mix consistent with a company investing in product depth and international operations rather than experimenting at the edges.
The honest counterfactual
What bears point to is the inherent volatility of a prize-draw business. Each campaign is essentially a standalone product launch, with prize-sourcing costs, marketing spend, and conversion all needing to clear a threshold for the charity (and Omaze) to come out ahead. Competitors including Charitybuzz, Prizeo, and the UK's Omaze-style operators chase the same celebrity rolodexes and creator partnerships, and platform-fee charity models have drawn regulatory scrutiny in multiple jurisdictions. What bulls answer is that Omaze has been running this playbook for thirteen years, has navigated sweepstakes law in three countries, and has built the kind of repeat-customer base that turns each winner-reveal video into the top of next quarter's funnel. The 2020 pivot beyond celebrity-only campaigns [TechCrunch, August 2020] was itself evidence the company can rework the format when the underlying mechanic tires.
What to watch
The next twelve months will likely be defined by three things: whether Omaze's UK and Germany operations grow into a credible second and third leg of the business, whether the cumulative giving number meaningfully crosses $200 million, and whether the company returns to market for a Series D against the billion-a-year ambition Pohlson laid out in 2020. The product itself will tell the story first. Watch the homepage. If the prizes get bigger and the campaigns shorter, the flywheel is working. If the catalog thins, something in the unit economics is being repriced.
The cultural question Omaze is implicitly answering is the one charities have been too polite to ask out loud for decades: what if generosity, for most people most of the time, needs to feel like buying a lottery ticket?