More than $70 trillion is moving from the hands of Boomers to the next generations and Ulupreneur Jenny Xia Spradling, co-founder of FreeWill, wants to see a big portion of that great wealth transfer go to nonprofits. She and co-CEO and co-founder Patrick Schmitt aim to make estate planning warm, intuitive, and free. The platform provides no-cost estate planning tools to individuals that make it easier to make bequests and also makes it simpler for nonprofit organizations to receive them. In 2022, FreeWill helped people commit more than $4B to nonprofits; by 2025, that number has more than doubled to $11.3B. FreeWill has gone far beyond how most people think about traditional ways of transferring wealth, and become a major player in the nonprofit technology space.
We caught up with Jenny to talk about recent milestones. In the video below, Jenny also shares her experience working with Ulu Ventures.
What are some of your more recent milestones?
We’ve launched a few big products that include updated ways of donating appreciated assets; stock, crypto, qualified charitable distributions (QCD), and donor advised funds (DAF) are now ways donors can give through the platform. In October of 2024, we purchased an early stage start-up, Grant Assistant, that helps nonprofits and NGOs write winning grants in a third of the time, yet another way to help charities diversify their funding streams. That team is primarily based in Pakistan, so we’re now an international company and have opened some of our hiring processes up to new countries in Latin America, for example. It’s really an extension of the move we made post-COVID to become a fully remote company.
We’re now able to find talent in new places, whether that’s in Bozeman or Buenos Aires or Lahore. Going remote has also been great from a diversity and inclusion perspective.”
You know, I’m a mom; I have two little kids, one and three years old. I frankly have no idea how founders handled motherhood before being remote-first; it just gives folks the flexibility they need to make their families work.
You raised $30M for your Series B in 2022. Founders are often always fundraising; what advice would you give them?
Fundraising is definitely different now than it was before, but similar principles still apply. It’s critical to think not just about the money, but who is a good fit for your company, and to target funders who deeply understand your customer’s pain points.
Frankly, I’ve seen a lot of founders get disheartened when they hear a “no” from a particular investor, but it’s okay—not everyone is going to be a good match”.
I would also caution founders about cash, it’s king in a way that it wasn’t three or four years ago. But to that I would say, I think that folks are really looking for a balance. Balancing growth and profitability is tricky, but we use the Rule of 40 (or Rule of 50, whichever you want to pick) as a good metric that we ground our entire exec team around. Every functional head is thinking about growth and profitability, adding them together. Growth-plus-margin over 40% is something that we need to achieve as a team, so making sure it’s deeply rooted and everyone’s thinking about that balance is really important.
What are your dreams for FreeWill?
At FreeWill, we want to create a great place to work for young people who both want to rapidly grow their careers and make technology that matters. We are striving to bring innovation to the nonprofit sector at a rapid pace, borrowing from the for-profit sector’s best practices and then leap-frogging where we can. My dream for FreeWill is that we move over $1T into charities that wouldn’t have gone to good causes if FreeWill didn’t exist. And that all this funding leads to curing cancer faster, reversing climate change, and creating thriving communities with opportunity for all.
