We took the Pledge 1% commitment before earning a single pound

Most companies plan to give back once they can afford it. We made the commitment before we had a single paying customer.

That is not a boast. It was a deliberate choice, and it has everything to do with what we are building and why you should care.

Let me explain how it happened.

How Neha Sampat changed how I think about giving

A few years ago, I had a conversation with Neha Sampat, the CEO of Contentstack. She told me about Pledge 1%, a global movement with a deceptively simple idea. Commit 1% of your equity, your profit, your product, or your time to doing good. Not when you reach a milestone. Not when the revenue is comfortable. Now, at the beginning, before it ever becomes inconvenient.

I had heard versions of that idea before. But the way Neha framed it stopped me. Giving back is not a reward you unlock when you get successful enough. It is a decision you make about who you are. You either are that kind of company, or you are not.

I came away from that conversation and talked to my co-founder Matt. We did not deliberate long.

Why we did it before the money came in

The timing was not accidental. We chose to make this commitment at the earliest possible stage, and that choice was entirely intentional.

Here is what happens when you wait. Revenue comes in, and with it comes more voices, more opinions, more competing pressures. The question of whether to give back turns into a question of how much, and who gets a say, and whether this quarter is really the right time. A value becomes a negotiation. We did not want that.

We wanted giving back to be a fact, not a discussion. The only way to guarantee that was to lock it in before anyone had any financial reason to push back against it.

There is something else here too. We are building a product for children. Everything we ask children to do inside Unomundi, we try to model ourselves. We ask them to look beyond their own corner of the world. We ask them to care about places and people they have never met. It would be strange, to put it mildly, to build that product inside a company that only started caring about others once it was profitable.

What Pledge 1% actually is

Pledge 1% is a global movement, founded with Salesforce among its founding partners, encouraging companies to give back through equity, profit, product, or time. More than 19,000 companies across 130 countries have now taken the pledge, according to the Pledge 1% organisation itself.

We are one of the smallest. That is fine. Size is not the point.

The point is that this community includes companies at every stage, from pre-revenue startups to some of the largest technology businesses in the world. The commitment does not scale with your bank balance. You give 1% of what you have, whatever that is at the time you make the choice.

What this means in practice for Unomundi

We have committed our 1% to causes aligned with what we are building: access to education, cultural exchange, and children's development in underserved communities. The specifics of how that 1% flows will grow clearer as we do, but the commitment is registered, public, and not going away.

Unomundi is a cultural-discovery app where children aged 6 to 12 explore countries and cultures through stories, games, and conversations with Una, a warm AI guide. We are a small team. We are early. But the values we want to be known for in five years, we have to live now.

That is the whole argument. The values you grow into are the ones you start with.

Why does this matter to you as a parent?

Because when you hand your child an app, you are not just handing them a product. You are handing them a company's values. You are letting those values into your home, into your child's attention, into the hours of childhood you cannot get back.

I think parents deserve to know what kind of company is behind the thing their child is spending time with. Not just what the product looks like, or what the safety settings are. What the people building it actually believe, and whether they have put their money where their mouth is.

We are not a charity. We are a startup that needs to build a sustainable business. But we are a startup that decided, before the business existed in any commercial sense, that some things are not for sale and not up for debate.

Giving back is one of them.

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FAQs

What is Pledge 1% and has Unomundi taken it?

Pledge 1% is a global movement encouraging companies to commit 1% of equity, profit, product, or time to social good. Unomundi took the pledge before earning any revenue, locking in the commitment before commercial pressures could complicate it.

Why did Unomundi commit to giving back so early?

The founders wanted giving back to be a founding fact, not a future negotiation. Once revenue arrives, more voices enter decisions about where money goes. Committing early meant the value was never up for debate.

What is Unomundi?

Unomundi is a cultural-discovery app where children aged 6 to 12 explore countries and cultures through stories, games, and conversations with Una, a warm AI guide.