SWFL nonprofit donor consulting firm surpasses $120M in revenue

Michael Peterman has long thought that charitable organizations are at a disadvantage. They’re tasked with raising money to tackle big problems, but they’re criticized if they approach the task with too much of a business mindset.

“You have to go out and you have to fundraise, and it’s expensive to do it,” he says. And if a nonprofit hires the best and brightest to do that and pays them accordingly, or if they spend too much on targeting donors and raising funds? “They’re vilified for it,” he says.

Peterman’s innovative approach to solve that issue is VeraData. He founded the Cape Coral-based business in 2007. The goal was to apply a commercial lens to charitable fundraising, using proprietary data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to guide decision-making. The company has worked with some 900 nonprofits since its founding and has helped raise more than $1 billion annually for its clients nationwide. It posted $120.2 million in revenue in 2025, and Peterma projects it will reach $164 million in 2026. 

The company’s overarching goal? To grow philanthropy as a percentage of global GDP. “We want to take it from just under 3% to maybe 4%, maybe 4.5%, who knows,” he says. “The impact of doing something like that would be massive in the world.”

Many nonprofits put a sizable focus on the cost to acquire a donor, and the desire is often for the lowest cost possible. By tapping into its massive data set on everything from the language that appeals most to potential donors to which kinds of packaging have high open and response rates, VeraData says it can reduce nonprofits’ costs to acquire new donors by 20% to 30% on average. 

But the company has also been able to demonstrate which donors pay off most for the organizations. “What we’re often discovering is the source with the highest cost to acquire is actually the best long-term value, and it has been deprioritized because it costs so much upfront,” says Peterman, 52. “So we’re looking at this through the lens of what’s best for the long-term health of the charity, and we’re reconfiguring how we think about audiences. I hate to say it’s innovation, but it is innovation in the sector.”

On mission

VeraData’s innovations have led to the company having an outsized influence on its client's coffers, which in turn provide opportunity for a big impact on the community. (The innovations are also one reason why Peterman was named an EY US Entrepreneur of the Year 2026 Florida Award winner.)

Consider St. Bonaventure Indian Mission & School in Thoreau, New Mexico. VeraData helped the nonprofit go from being a $3 million a year organization to about an $18 million organization. “That’s allowed us to increase our services and be able to help more people,” says Chris Halter, the organization’s executive director. “I feel like sometimes when we were a $3 million organization, we were just providing a Band-Aid for a lot of families and issues. And now I feel like we’re able to provide real long-term solutions.”

As a full-spectrum fundraising intelligence enterprise, VeraData’s reach extends beyond just donor analytics to creative services and production, where it’s also able to help nonprofits reduce costs. The company is launching an AI agentic platform in beta testing right now. “Every mom and pop charity in America that has a desire to grow and that has a good thesis, we’re going to level the playing field and democratize access to the intelligence and the pricing structures to put them on the same level as the biggest charities in America,” says Peterman.

Peterman considers himself a pioneer when it comes to machine learning and artificial intelligence in fundraising. “We were the first to bring this to charities,” he says. “The vernacular was unknown. We would talk about machine learning and support vectors and different types of analytic methodologies, and nobody knew what we were saying. Most people still don’t know.”

The company might have more competition in the space now, but Peterman believes its years and years of data still sets it apart. “Artificial intelligence without accurate, complete, timely, consistent data — it’s a jet without fuel,” he says. “So many people are leaning on AI for decision support, but they lack the data science know-how, data architectures and processes to encode the information in a way that allows them to make use of the AI tools that exist. The lift for us is to try to communicate to folks that don’t have a data science background that the key to the success of this is not the algorithms themselves, it’s the underlying data.”

VeraData still offers clients free proof of concept, a holdover from its startup days. “If we don’t improve your results, you don’t have to pay us,” says Peterman. “Nobody else is willing to put skin in the game like that.”

That guarantee matters. 

“VeraData is one of the most ethical companies that I’ve ever worked with in my life, and they are completely transparent with what they’re doing and what their costs are,”Halter says. “And what I’ve liked about Michael personally is if something is not working, he gets into the problem up to his elbows trying to figure out what went wrong, why it went wrong and how we can correct it. You don’t see that with many CEOs of major companies.”

Hard road

The company’s services have become more important than ever with higher costs for almost everything impacting both nonprofits and their donors. “The number of donors at large in this country is down year over year, because people have less and because more of their disposable income is being consumed with these higher prices of goods and services,” says Peterman. “People who don’t have a lot are some of the best donors, as a percentage. They give way more than their wealthy counterparts, but they’re being impacted by either AI job disruption or inflation.”

Peterman was raised in an entrepreneurial family, but that doesn’t necessarily make innovating come easy. “Innovation requires focus, discipline, belief,” he says. “There’s nothing easy about innovating. … Getting the idea is hard, but taking it from idea to application is even harder. Most good ideas die, because the road to bringing them to life is too difficult.”