The top 50 purpose-driven startups of 2025 🤩
Get some inspo from this hand-picked list of startups doing meaningful work
🔥 If things look a little different in this week’s newsletter, don’t worry. You’re in the right place! This newsletter is the latest incarnation of Kevan Lee’s Substack and Bonfire’s company newsletter, Kumbaya Moments. Same great content, shiny new look. 🔥
Hi there! You’re reading the Bonfire newsletter from Kevan Lee & Shannon Deep. Each week, we highlight brand, marketing, and creative learnings from our experience as in-house marketers turned agency owners who think a lot about creativity, our relationship to work, and how all of that impacts our identities. We’ll also feature insights from our digital community of super smart folks (which you’re welcome to join).
Wishing you a great week!
Why yes you can be a startup and care about purpose
It’s not easy being a venture-backed startup whose ambitions go beyond “maximize shareholder revenue.” We all have experience at startups where top-line growth is the north star, so it’s incredibly refreshing to come across startups who see the world a little differently. More goodwill, less gross margin. More impact, less EBITDA.
Whenever I come across a startup brand that wears its heart and soul on its sleeve, I can’t help but take notice. Startups have such incredible potential to shape the world around us; it’s refreshing to find a startup that takes this responsibility seriously, publicly, from the very beginning.
These startups are worth celebrating.
They’re worth supporting.
(They’re worth applying to if you want to work somewhere purposeful.)
So we thought it a good idea to throw a little digital party for 50 startups that are making a conscious effort to build their business around a clear and public purpose.
Meet the Rise 50! The top purpose-driven startups of 2025
Our Rise 50 list is a collection of 50 early-stage startups across five impact categories, startups that are doing amazing work to make our world a little better, one product feature and marketing campaign at a time.
To create this list, we researched hundreds of early-stage startups to identify ones with clear and public purpose statements that spoke of a greater-good impact of the business. Sometimes, these statements took the form of manifestos published to the company website; other times, the mission was baked into the About page or the company boilerplate.
This is, of course, not an exhaustive list of everyone who is doing purpose-driven work out there. (And it’s also true that having a stated purpose doesn’t always mean that the company is making good on its promises.) But this is hopefully not the only year we’ll be putting together a Rise 50 list. If you want to help us shape and improve future years, we’d love your feedback. And if you want your company to be featured, we’d love your early nomination! (2026 here we come …)
Here are the 50 startups who made the list. We’ll highlight one or two below, and feel free to visit the Rise 50 page for full explainers on all 50 companies.
Rise 50 list
Access & community
This group of startups is doing amazing things to expand access and provide tools for communities and populations who are often on the margins of tech innovation.
Ava — AI-based speech recognition and live captioning solution
BrightUp — Financial wellness benefit provider
Dollaride — Clean transportation for underserved communities
Folx Health — The first digital healthcare service provider for the LGBTQIA+ community
Jeenie — Direct-to-Interpreter (DTI) platform
Lami — Digital insurance platform for agents and brokers
My Beacon — Financial app purpose-built for immigrants
PurposeMed — Secure virtual healthcare platform
Suma Wealth — Wealth building digital platform for the Latinx community
Spotlight: Suma Wealth
A lot of financial apps are do-everything, for-everyone. But Suma is hyperfocused on their core persona, the U.S. Latinx community, which allows them to stay close to their purpose of making money matters relatable, accessible, and simple to understand so that the Latinx community can prosper. Dig deeper into their approach here.
Viva Benefits — Rent-to-invest platform
Climate & clean tech
We love a good climate tech startup! Here are 10 favorite up-and-comers who are building products with real-world / real-climate impact.
Captura — Carbon removal solutions
Epyr — Thermal storage solution
E-Zinc — Long duration energy storage
General Galactic — Fossil-free fuel and energy
Mote — Carbon removal and clean hydrogen production
Pani — AI platform for water treatment
Safi — AI-powered global B2B marketplace for trading recyclables
Sequestra — A solution for turning residues into building materials that store carbon dioxide forever
VEMS — Digital platform for smart energy transitions
CleanHub — Asset-light waste management
Spotlight: CleanHub
Life is best lived on a clean planet
Preach! CleanHub’s whole online presence is like one big storybook explaining their impact on the climate causes that matter to them: plastic pollution, waste reduction, clean oceans. They have clearly put a lot of thought into the solution, even going so far as to publish their theory of change for how they’re approaching plastic waste.
Community & social
This people-centric category covers the tools that are making a difference in the places and spaces we call home (or school, or work).
abillion — P2P marketplace for sustainability
AllVoices — All-in-one employee relations platform
Spotlight: AllVoices
Their mission: To foster healthy workplaces and to make workplaces safer. This is an awesome encapsulation of purpose; sure the product category is software for employees to report things to HR, but the real outcome here is safer, healthier workplaces! This is all captured really beautifully on AllVoices’s About page.
Builders Patch — Finance software for multifamily housing
Do Good Points — A platform that gamifies giving
Goodr — Sustainable food waste management and hunger solutions
Magic School — AI platform for schools
Spotlight: Magic School
Their belief: Educators are the magic, not AI. On the Magic School website, you can dig deeper into why they built Magic School. It’s refreshing and inspiring to see this level of devotion to a company’s purpose—and to see it so publicly stated!
Oboe — Educational platform
Papaya Pay — Mobile app simplifying bill payments
Plural Policy — Specialized AI for public policy and regulatory work
Prepared 911 — Assistive AI for every phase of emergency response
Healthcare & wellness
There’s a ton of interesting stuff happening in the health tech space, and much of it is purposeful by nature. Check out these startups that are solving big health problems in intriguing ways with brands that care about their impact on people/the world.
Affect Therapeutics — Digital addiction treatment programs
Anterior — AI platform for healthcare operations
Betterleave — Family caregiver support platform
Camber Health — Financial software for healthcare
Foundation Health — AI-powered infrastructure for digital healthcare
Greenspace Health — Measurement-based care technology
Kintsugi Health — Voice biomarker software
Ignota Labs — AI technology for solving drug safety issues
Slingshot AI — Generative AI model for psychology
Systole Health — Virtual group care for women
Future of technology
Even your more traditional B2B or B2C tech companies can thrive with a purpose-driven foundations, as these 10 startups are testament to. Their tech spans a variety of software categories, but they all have a clear mission for how why they exist and the mission they serve.
Adalo — No-code app builder
Created by Humans — AI rights licensing platform for books
Doppel — AI-powered social engeineering defense platform
Fern AI — AI agent platform
Hoop — AI task management
Oumi — Open source AI platform
Plain — B2B support platform
Spotlight: Plain
Is this the coolest Manifesto page we’ve seen? Why yes. Yes it is.
Not only is it cool just by mere existence (more B2B software products should have manifestos, right?) but when you mouse over each of the sticky notes, a different customer pain point appears. People, clearly, have issues with the current landscape of support tools.
Protect AI — Cybersecurity for AI and ML systems
ToumAI — Voice intelligence solutions
Trustible — Technology provider of responsible AI governance
Thank you for rising up!
Congratulations to all 50 of these companies—and a big THANK YOU for serving as inspiration for how startups can be built, purpose-forward and mission-centric. We do a lot of this work with our brand strategies at Bonfire, and it’s wonderful to get to celebrate a big long list of others who see the world the same way.
P.S.
If this kind of purpose-first approach is intriguing to you or your company, we can help! With the right strategy, you can turn your purpose-led brand into a growth lever. Let us show you how.
Notable links, convos, and events
The following are all pulled from the Campout community.
Come hang out with us this Wednesday, April 23, for virtual co-working! We’re hosting a little co-work session over Zoom, and we’d love to see you there. It will be casual (like everything we do) and will be great if you’re looking for some productivity accountability, some friendly faces to cheer you on, or just some community connection. You can RSVP here. The event is free for all Campout members.
New template alert: Hot off the presses, here’s a content strategy template that you can use to organize your content approach and rally your team. The template touches on both the strategy and the tactics, so you'll be covered from A to Z.
We learned about vibe-coding. tl;dr—give AI your wildest dreams, let AI make you something, don’t worry too much about it being perfect. Sounds like my ideal coding!
But wait! There’s more…
Wanna be friends?
If you love this newsletter and wish it were more interactive, you’re in luck! Join us over in Campout, our digital community for creative marketers and the creative curious.
Wanna work with us?
If you need help with brand strategy and storytelling, fractional brand and marketing leadership, and bringing your brand strategy to life in impactful ways, send us an email at hello@aroundthebonfire.com to get in touch.
As always, you can find us on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Threads.
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