Couchange is a universal donation platform that allows people to donate anything to anyone. While still in development, this online service intends to make it easy for people to donate “couch change” type items such as partially-used gift cards, accumulated frequent flier miles, and other private currencies to charities across the world. Currently, these assets are usually discarded, expire, or abandoned by their owners over time. However, just like the loose coins that fall forgotten behind seat cushions, if someone bothers to collect them all together, one can raise meaningful amounts of money through alternative fundraising. By creating a user-friendly system that allows anyone to donate whatever spare assets they have to their charity of choice, Couchange hopes to facilitate giving even in these tough economic times.

Model: Couchange intends to go live this fall with its first monetization market, for unused gift cards. Gift Cards are an $80B annual market. Of this, an estimated $8B a year goes unredeemed, offering an enormous source of “found money” for philanthropy. Couchange will sustain its marketing and operations by imposing a conventional handling fee on financial transactions.

Founder: Jia is a recent Stanford graduate whose entrepreneurial résumé includes roles at nearly ten start-ups, two of which he founded himself and one of which, Dancetown, a fitness solution for senior citizens, was recently acquired. Jia is committed to passing on the lessons learned in his entrepreneurship and has lectured at Stanford, Carnegie Mellon and Chengdu University, China. He has been a teacher with the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship and and organizer for the Pittsburgh’s Pod Camp incubator.

His partner, Nathan Hu, holds a Master’s in Information Systems Management from Carnegie Mellon. Nathan has worked on projects for DARPA, Sony and JP Morgan. Nathan is originally from China, where three years ago he founded an IT services firm that now employs over 100 people.