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Chef Marcus Samuelsson teams up with Sage Digital to launch Project Bento fundraising platform
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the ongoing protests for racial justice, people have been looking for different ways to contribute, which in turn has led tech companies to launch new features and campaigns.
Now there’s a new fundraising platform called Project Bento, created by chef and restauranteur Marcus Samuelsson (best known as the chef behind Red Rooster Harlem), Derek Evans (CEO of the Marcus Samuelsson Group) and the team at Sage Digital (a startup creating tools for reviewers, chefs and other experts to publish content and build a following).
Samuelsson told me that he’d already been working with Sage Digital to create a presence on the platform. Then he mentioned Harlem Serves Up, this year’s version of the annual Harlem EatUp festival — Samuelsson and his team reinvented the event during the pandemic as as a fundraising telethon for nonprofits fighting food insecurity.
But, Samuelsson said that when he surveyed the options available to manage the online fundraising, he wasn’t quite satisfied with any of the available options.
Image Credits: Project Bento
“We were thinking very much about our needs — what were we building, how do we want consumers to utilize it,” he said.
So the Sage Digital team ended up building Project Bento in seven or eight weeks, on top of the startup’s existing platform. Sage CEO Samir Arora said that along with allowing nonprofits to collect funds (without having to pay a platform fee), publish content, promote on social media and track their campaigns, the platform also includes tools for managing sponsorships and matching donors.
The rapid development, Samuelsson said, was a perfect demonstration of “what entrepreneurship is.” Thus far, Project Bento has been used to raise more than $350,000 for Harlem Serves Up, as well as $4.8 million for the Project Bento Fund (which Arora described as a “completely new nonprofit whose purpose is to create matching funds” for campaigns on the platform).
There are several other campaigns live already, as well as links to employee relief fundraisers on other platforms, but Project Bento is also accepting applications from other nonprofits that want to fundraise on the platform. Samuelsson said he wants the website to be a place that can bring many of these campaigns together.
“There are communities not just in Harlem, but across the country, that need a campaign, they need to connect,” Samuelsson said. “[Project Bento] will continue because that need, raising money and connecting a community, will continue.”
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Sage Plus for Experts gives travel experts a central place to share their content
Sage is giving reviewers, chefs and other experts and publishers a central place to share all their content.
To do this, the startup has created a new product called Sage Plus for Experts, which isn’t open to the public yet, but is accepting signups from those aforementioned travel experts — the kinds of experts who can share content around things to do, food, drinks, experiences and shopping.
Founder and CEO Samir Arora (who previously led Mode Media/Glam Media) suggested that a Sage profile can serve as the center of a creator or publisher’s online presence. And eventually, it could become the foundation for them to build their own personal direct-to-consumer brand.
In the announcement, Arora said the product was designed to answer a simple question: “Why does the internet not offer a simple way to show recommendations by real experts or the authentic experiences and products by the brands we trust and love?”
Back in 2017, when he first told me about his vision for Sage, Arora said his goal was to create a reliable source for location data. In an interview earlier this month, he said the plan to focus on verified sources eventually led him to this new product.
“We started to say that the only way to have verified information is to go backwards, to verify the sources of information — the journalists,” he said.
To do that, Sage starting curating a list of trusted experts, and it started working with those experts, who Arora said were asking for something like this. He showed me how someone could come onto the Sage service and quickly connect their social media accounts and author pages —after that, the profile updates automatically.
So there’s no technical expertise required, and after the initial setup, no additional work — though if they want to, experts can also post reviews and lists made specifically for Sage. They can even publish their Sage profile as a separate mobile app, and start monetizing through things like bookings and merchandise sales.
In some cases, the profile will already exist, and the expert simply needs to claim it.
“We’ve been manually curating sources while training an AI to reliably go out into the world to find people who are professionally in this business,” Arora said.
He added that Sage’s list has already grown to 5 million experts, with 200,000 active profiles. The active experts include food critic Masuhiro Yamamoto (whom you may know from “Jiro Dreams of Sushi”).
Ultimately, all expert content goes back into the broader Sage platform, and it will allow the startup to recommend trustworthy publishers and provide travel recommendations on what to do and where to go.
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Samir Arora unveils Sage Digital, a startup that’s all about accurate location data
Samir Arora says it’s time for a new wave of applications that use reliable location data. Arora previously founded Mode Media (which he departed before its shutdown last year, though he remains involved in Mode Media Japan) and NetObjects before that. Today he’s unveiling Sage Digital, the startup that he’s hoping will provide the data for that new wave. Arora said Sage has… Read More
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