Build for impact.Build forimpact.

Ismael

Founder & CEO

Ismael has been building companies since 2013. The first two didn’t work: a chores app that raised a funding round and passed a few hundred thousand downloads before it stalled, and a campus sharing app that ran for two years. He sold the three that followed. Skyla, an e-commerce business, was turning over $50m a year when he exited it. Shamaazi spent eight years building subscription products for people who wanted to give regularly, and raised more than $100m for hundreds of charities. Givematch, a donor-matching marketplace, added another $30m. Ismael’s first degree was in Mathematics, and he later studied a second bachelors in Law and Anthropology at LSE. His family left Eritrea, one of the world’s most repressive regimes, and his work is ultimately an extension of his family’s generational pursuit of freedoms. He is sceptical of aid that leaves charities dependent on the next campaign, and more interested in what becomes possible when they can fund themselves over decades instead. Evergive came out of that — giving designed to compound over time rather than reset every year. Outside of work, Ismael is an avid aviator, a devoted horseman, and a lifelong supporter of Chelsea — though he admits that following Chelsea lately has tested his resilience as much as entrepreneurship ever has.

As founder and CEO, Ismael sets the direction and holds the bar for the company. He moves between product, strategy, fundraising, partnerships, hiring, and the bigger questions around where Evergive should go next, while staying close enough to the detail to challenge decisions properly. He is usually the person making the hardest trade-offs, from what gets built to how the business model evolves and which opportunities are worth pursuing. He hands over real autonomy early, expects people to build context quickly, and is focused on work that moves the company forward. Working alongside him means being exposed to the full breadth of how a startup is built, with unusually high ownership, fast feedback, and a constant expectation to raise the standard.

Oliver

Founder’s Associate

Oliver graduated with First Class Honours in History from Durham University. Whilst at university, he helped scale an early-stage fintech startup to over 5,000 users. He then spent two years in management consulting, working with clients across a broad range of industries to solve complex commercial and operational challenges. Alongside a demanding consulting career, he was the Global Business Development Lead for 180 Degrees Consulting, the world’s largest social impact consultancy, supporting thousands of charities around the world. Outside of work, he helped build and scale a media company from an idea to over 800,000 followers and multiple revenue streams. Prior to Evergive, Oliver joined a tech startup in a sales role, securing over 200 deals in just a few months, before receiving an offer from its parent company to establish and lead a new business. Ultimately, he turned this down, along with Master’s offers from Oxford and Cambridge, to join and grow Evergive. Away from work, he enjoys getting out into nature for walks, runs, and drives, and is currently building an app in his spare time to help people discover remarkable countryside destinations.

Oliver is Evergive’s generalist operator. He works across almost every part of the company, taking on essentially anything that doesn’t require deep engineering specialism. His remit spans operations, product, commercial, partnerships, marketing, and strategy. He helps translate company priorities into product plans and coordinated launches; builds the processes behind charity onboarding, grant operations, reporting, compliance, and internal systems; develops partnerships and commercial infrastructure; shapes campaigns and messaging; and works directly with Ismael on major decisions, new initiatives, and urgent cross-functional problems that don’t fit neatly within one team. The common thread is execution: Oliver takes ambiguous, high-priority work, creates structure around it, and drives it through to a useful outcome, whether that means launching an initiative, building a new company system, removing a bottleneck, or doing the unglamorous work needed to keep Evergive moving.

Ailín

Senior Software Engineer

Ailín graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Advertising before pivoting into software engineering, bringing a rare combination of creative thinking and deep technical expertise. Whilst studying Software Engineering at UADE and UTN, she began her career across product, data, and finance before moving into software engineering at Despegar, one of Latin America’s largest technology companies. Ailín has spent almost a decade solving software engineering’s hardest problems, from large-scale distributed systems to production AI. She’s architected platforms that process financial data at scale, built products used by more than one million users, and engineered cloud-native systems that thrive under real-world pressure. She was the first engineering hire at an early-stage start-up, brought in to build the technical foundation from the ground up; she designed the core architecture and shaped the technology that took the business from zero to £250k ARR. She knows exactly what it takes to turn an idea into something real. Ailín moves effortlessly between AI, machine learning, large language models, and high-performance backend systems, including research-driven work with academic partners that went from lab to production. Ailín builds software that’s elegant and built to last. Outside of work, Ailín enjoys bouldering, writing, and painting, giving her plenty of outlets for the same mix of creativity and problem-solving she brings to engineering.

At Evergive, Ailín works across the complete engineering stack, building the products used by donors, charities, and partners while strengthening the systems that power them behind the scenes. Her work spans Evergive’s donor journey, charity dashboard, administration tools, partner SDK, AI giving technology, infrastructure, data, integrations, monitoring, security, testing, and production reliability. Drawing on her background in large-scale data platforms, distributed systems, cloud architecture, and production AI, Ailín brings a particular depth to the technical foundations that allow the product to remain fast, secure, and dependable as it grows. She works across the full lifecycle, from shaping architecture and evaluating models to shipping features, resolving incidents, improving performance, and reducing technical debt.

Andrew

Senior Software Engineer

Andrew graduated with First Class Honours in Computer Science from the University of Lincoln before beginning his career at Rolls-Royce, where he developed engine control software for the Trent XWB, the world’s largest civil aerospace engine powering the Airbus A350. He has since built software across established retailers, high-growth startups, and AI companies, helping replatform Selfridges’ digital experience using micro frontends, Next.js, Apollo GraphQL, and modern backend architecture, while also developing payment systems, DevOps infrastructure, and micro frontend applications at Dunelm. Most recently, Andrew built an agentic AI platform designed to help industrial sites reduce their carbon emissions, tackling a sector responsible for around 2% of global emissions. Specialising in full-stack engineering and modern AI technologies, Andrew has spent his career architecting scalable systems, leading complex technical projects, and turning ambitious product ideas into robust, production-ready software. Outside of work, Andrew is a purple belt in jiu-jitsu and enjoys hiking and travelling whenever he gets the chance.

At Evergive, Andrew works across every layer of the product, from the experiences used by donors and charities to the infrastructure, integrations, and AI systems behind them. He helps build and evolve Evergive’s donor journey, charity dashboard, administration tools, partner SDK, and AI giving technology, while contributing across architecture, deployment, monitoring, security, testing, and production support. Drawing on his background in full-stack product engineering, micro frontends, complex integrations, and agentic systems, Andrew has a particular strength for turning ambitious ideas into intuitive, resilient products that work in the real world. In a small engineering team, there are no narrow lanes: he helps take work from early technical thinking through to release, operation, and continuous improvement.