Neta Foundation: Donor-Advised Fund Platform

A custom platform for contributions, grants, investments, GrantVestments™, and donor-advised fund management.

Overview

Neta operates a modern donor-advised fund platform supported by a custom web application where donors can manage their funds, contribute assets, recommend grants, participate in GrantVestments, manage investments, and track activity. Gigareef took over development of the existing production platform in October 2025 and now serves as Neta’s ongoing development partner, responsible for application development, integrations, testing, infrastructure, deployment, and maintenance.

Neta donor-advised fund dashboard showing balances and account actions

Neta workflow for contributing securities to a donor-advised fund

Project background

Neta was created to provide a more flexible way to deploy philanthropic capital, with a particular focus on scientific research and early-stage technologies. Its platform combines traditional charitable giving with investment-oriented functionality, allowing donors to contribute assets to a DAF and deploy them through grants, investments, and Neta’s proprietary GrantVestment model.

When Gigareef joined the project, Neta already had a live application developed by another engineering team. Rather than rebuilding it, we learned the existing architecture and business logic, assumed responsibility for the application and AWS infrastructure, and worked with Neta to reprioritize an inherited backlog while addressing technical debt and continuing active development.

Today, Gigareef works closely with Neta to translate evolving business and operational requirements into production software. Our role spans project management, development, testing, integrations, cloud infrastructure, deployment, and ongoing maintenance.

Solution

Neta is a sophisticated financial application with interconnected donor, fund, investment, grant, and administrative workflows. Here’s some of what we maintain and continue to develop:

Donor-Advised Fund Management

The platform gives users a centralized experience for managing their donor-advised funds, including contribution requests, balances, activity, grants, investments, and GrantVestments. Users with multiple funds can also transfer cash, investments, and GrantVestment positions between them.

Grants & Charitable Giving

Donors can recommend grants to charitable organizations directly through their funds, with the platform supporting the request lifecycle, documentation, receipts, and administrative processing. Charity Navigator is integrated into the platform to provide access to information about U.S. registered charities.

GrantVestments

Neta’s GrantVestments bridge charitable giving and impact investing, allowing donors to use DAF assets to support early-stage technologies and other curated projects with the potential to generate both impact and financial returns. The platform manages GrantVestments from discovery and recommendation through processing, updates, distributions, and completion, while tracking investment-style performance metrics including MOIC, DPI, TVPI, and RVPI.

Investment Management

Donors can make investment recommendations and monitor those investments within their funds. The platform supports investment dashboards, buy and sell workflows, historical asset pricing, distributions, transfers, transaction history, and integrations with financial market data.

Administrative Platform

A dedicated administrative application gives Neta’s team tools to manage users and funds, process requests, oversee grants, investments and GrantVestments, access transaction information, generate reports and exports, and perform administrative actions across the platform.

Financial & Third-Party Integrations

The platform connects with external financial, accounting, charity, and transaction services, including Sage Intacct, Chariot, Charity Navigator, and financial market data providers. These integrations connect Neta’s custom application with the systems and data its operations depend on.

Cloud Infrastructure & DevOps

Gigareef assumed responsibility for Neta’s AWS infrastructure alongside the application itself. The platform uses containerized services, serverless functions, managed databases, cloud authentication, scheduled processes, Terraform-managed infrastructure, and GitHub Actions for continuous integration and deployment.

Testing & Development Environments

We expanded automated testing, logging, and monitoring around critical application workflows and developed tooling for creating realistic lower-environment databases from production data while masking sensitive information, making complex scenarios easier to reproduce and safely test.

Technology

React

TypeScript

Material UI

NestJS

Node.js

PostgreSQL

TypeORM

AWS

Amazon ECS

AWS Lambda

Amazon RDS

Amazon S3

Amazon CloudFront

AWS Cognito

Terraform

Docker

GitHub Actions

CloudWatch

Sage Intacct

Chariot

Charity Navigator API

Tiingo

Mixpanel

Outcomes

Since taking over development, Gigareef has become Neta’s ongoing product and engineering partner, maintaining the existing platform while continuously extending its functionality and strengthening the systems around it. The engagement demonstrates our ability to inherit a sophisticated production application, understand another team’s architecture, take responsibility for its infrastructure, and continue moving the product forward as the client’s requirements evolve.

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