Carl Handy Launches “Pitchin” Crowdfunding Platform to Revolutionize Local Fundraising
By Antonio Dey | HGP Nightly News|
GEORGETOWN, GUYANA — In a major breakthrough for Guyana’s expanding digital economy, a young home-grown software engineer has officially launched a revolutionary crowdfunding platform designed to completely transform how individuals, corporate brands, charities, and community groups raise capital for humanitarian and commercial causes.
The specialized online fundraising ecosystem, appropriately titled Pitchin, is the brainchild of Carl Handy, a tech entrepreneur and software engineer hailing originally from ‘A’ Field, Sophia. Handy officially unveiled his innovative application during a high-profile keynote session at the Venture for Guyana Global Growth and Commerce Summit, hosted at the newly operational World Trade Centre Georgetown.
Engineered directly as a tailored, localized alternative to massive international platforms like GoFundMe, Pitchin provides a safe and highly secure space for users to deploy custom fundraising campaigns. Organizers can seamlessly generate and distribute a single, verified donation link across social media feeds, giving non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and disaster victims a streamlined, transparent avenue to secure immediate financial support.
Reflecting on his upbringing in Sophia, Handy emphasized that his primary motivation was to leverage advanced, scalable code to solve immediate, real-world vulnerabilities affecting ordinary Guyanese.
“In Guyana, if a family experiences an emergency such as their home burning down, they would typically post on Facebook,” Handy explained during an exclusive interview with Nightly News. “They’ll post their phone numbers, they will post their raw bank information openly on Facebook. What Pitchin does is provide a safe space for you to do that. You create one campaign, you get a secure link that you can share widely, allowing persons to contribute directly and safely.”
To anchor the app’s financial infrastructure and guarantee transactional accessibility across all socio-economic demographics, Pitchin has secured a milestone technical partnership with Mobile Money Guyana (MMG). Under this unified payment configuration, all active campaigns are funded directly via the MMG digital wallet ecosystem.
Handy disclosed that the collaboration allows the startup to comfortably bypass the restrictive international banking walls and high credit card merchant fees that heavily penalize local consumers on foreign platforms.
“We have collaborated with MMG to provide the payment solutions,” Handy noted. “MMG provides us with great rates that allow the platform to be even cheaper than GoFundMe.”
The platform’s operational model has already captured immediate praise and institutional validation from major corporate stakeholders and premier humanitarian bodies, including Food for the Poor Guyana. Beyond handling localized emergency relief, the system is engineered to resolve a persistent, high-fee bottleneck plaguing the Guyanese diaspora. By streamlining low-fee cross-border digital transfers, Pitchin makes it significantly easier for overseas Guyanese to securely send capital back home for local community initiatives and family emergencies.
Looking aggressively toward future expansion, Handy revealed that his engineering team is already building out a highly anticipated second phase called Pitch Invest. Slated for strategic rollout in the coming months, this secondary digital arm will act as an equity-matching framework, directly connecting rising Guyanese entrepreneurs and tech startups with international angel investors and venture capitalists looking to place capital into high-growth sectors like agriculture, manufacturing, technology, and renewable energy.
Handy’s successful platform launch underscores a larger, accelerating transformation defining Guyana’s contemporary tech landscape—proving that local engineers are no longer just consuming imported software, but are actively building the data-driven systems required to power a self-sufficient, resilient digital society.
