PE firm Apax Partners says it is merging three companies that make software for non-profits, EveryAction, Social Solutions, and CyberGrants, in a deal worth $2B
and it leads to scammy practices having a PE firm in charge seems next level bad https://twitter.com/... Matt Browner Hamlin / @mattkbh : Good to see private equity making big moves in the lucrative *checks notes* not-for-profit tech space https://www.bloomberg.com/... Robyn Swirling / @rswirling : Enormously bad news for the progressive digital ecosystem. I can't think of a better day to have a conversation about switching your org to @TheActionNet. https://twitter.com/... EveryAction / @everyactionhq : EveryAction CEO @stutrev and Apax's Jason Wright spoke to Bloomberg about the latest investments and the creation of a landscape-defining social good software platform. Read more: https://www.bloomberg.com/... Josh Nelson / @josh_nelson : Private equity firm Apax partners is acquiring EveryAction, which recently acquired Salsa, ActionKit, Blue State Digital and several other technology companies nonprofits and Democratic campaigns rely on to reach supporters and raise money: https://www.bloomberg.com/... Jon Green / @_jon_green : stuff like this has me wondering how weird the United States is in how much of what we think of as party infrastructure is privatized/decentralized. is there an equivalent of blue state digital in, say, germany? or do the parties handle those functions in-house? https://twitter.com/... Laura Olin / @lauraolin : time for Dem campaigns and nonprofits to get off EveryAction https://www.bloomberg.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Private equity has been circling politically sensitive infrastructure for years — the Francisco Partners portfolio of Sandvine and NSO Group showed how far that can go — and Apax is now applying the same sponsor logic to the tools nonprofits run on. The $2B combination of EveryAction, Social Solutions, and CyberGrants puts fundraising, case management, and grantmaking software for much of the sector under one owner.
The reaction was immediate inside the progressive digital world, where EveryAction's roots in Democratic organizing make it near-default infrastructure; organizers like Robyn Swirling framed it as bad news for the ecosystem and began pointing peers toward alternatives such as The Action Network. That follows earlier vendor-dependence complaints, including nonprofits' finding that Facebook's donation tools leave them with virtually useless donor data — the sector already knows what it loses when platforms own the relationship.
First-order effects
- Nonprofits, grantmakers, and advocacy groups using any of the three products now face a single owner across fundraising, client services, and grants workflows — one contract renewal cycle, one roadmap, one price negotiator.
Second-order effects
- Independent alternatives like The Action Network get a recruiting window: every integration change or fee move by the merged entity pushes risk-averse nonprofit buyers to evaluate switching, converting PE ownership directly into competitor pipeline.
Third-order effects
- If sponsors keep consolidating mission-critical civic software, the sector faces the same scrutiny pattern that hit Francisco Partners over Sandvine and NSO — financial owners of political infrastructure becoming a governance question, not just a procurement one.
The trend: Private equity is consolidating the software layer underneath civil society, making who owns nonprofit infrastructure a recurring political question.