Foundant Introduces Fia, a New AI Platform Built for Social Good Organizations

New platform with built-in social good context unifies data across a foundation’s systems, bringing their collective wisdom into focus, ensuring every decision, every grant, every dollar goes further

BOZEMAN, Mont., Sept. 02, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Foundant today introduced Fia™ (Funder Intelligence Advisor), a new AI platform purpose-built from the ground up specifically for social good organizations who want instant, trusted access to their organization’s collective wisdom.

Built on more than 20 years of social good and philanthropic experience, Fia is designed to address a challenge familiar to nearly every grantmaking team: knowledge scattered across disconnected systems, insights that take days to compile, and reporting and other manual work that pulls staff away from mission-critical work. By analyzing, indexing, and enriching an organization's data into one integrated knowledge base, Fia is built to help teams get answers in seconds — with every response cited back to the underlying data.

"As a trusted technology partner to the social good sector, we feel a responsibility to cut through the noise of emerging technology and bring forward solutions that add real, pragmatic value to your work — safely, transparently, and ethically. Fia is the clearest expression of that belief yet: an AI platform shaped directly by our clients' own challenges and priorities, built to help them benefit from the full power of their data, spend less time on repetitive work and more time advancing the human elements of their missions. I'm grateful to our early-adopter clients for the partnership and feedback that helped us refine this solution, and even more excited for how this solution will help our clients enhance the impact they have in the world as Fia continues to evolve." — Josh Mallamud, Chief Executive Officer, Foundant

The Power of Fia

Foundations face a data dilemma that doesn't get enough attention. They have the knowledge that would make their grantmaking smarter — what worked, what didn't, what patterns predict success — but that information lives in disconnected systems and tenured staff experience. Generic AI tools don't fix this, because they weren't built for how foundations actually operate. Fia is.

Fia brings together data from the systems a foundation already uses - Foundant’s grants and foundation management solutions, other grants management systems, CRM, finance systems, SharePoint, Google Drive, and more - into a single, secure organizational context, so teams can access that knowledge through natural conversation, automated reports, intelligent agents, and custom workflows, all with citation trails so staff know exactly where every answer comes from.  

Fia enables social good organizations to

• Analyze the impact of a portfolio or program or automate multi-step research and reporting tasks through configurable workflows and AI agents
• Allow staff to ask questions across all organizational data in plain language and receive contextual answers with cited data sources
• Generate AI-assisted reports, data visualizations, dashboards, board decks, and impact reports drawn from an organization’s own data
• Apply governance controls automatically – including an AI policy engine, screening for bias, and full administrative visibility into how AI is used across the organization – to every query and output

"I've spent more than twenty years building technology for the social good sector, and over the last two years my team and I sat down with more than a hundred grantmakers — small organizations, large foundations, family foundations, community foundations — to understand where AI could actually help. The same problem kept coming up in almost every conversation: the information that defines an organization is scattered across a grants management system, a shared drive, a CRM, a finance system, and none of those systems talk to each other. We started calling it the grantmaker's data dilemma. Fia is our answer to it, built not just to access an organization's data, but to actually understand it." — Jason Ricci, VP, Strategic Innovation, Foundant

Privacy and Governance by Design

Fia was built around the same AI principles that guide all Foundant's products: AI use is optional, clearly identified, and never used to train external AI models, with client data encrypted at every step.

"The focus of everything we look to do with AI is supporting human judgement, connection, and impact. At Foundant, we have always been about making the processes of social good efficient, creating capacity and leverage for the people using our technology to do what they do best. AI gives us some powerful new capabilities and possibilities to extend the value we offer our clients in service of their missions. As we build AI-powered features into our existing products, enable easy connection of our products for use with external AI tools, and develop new products powered by AI, our goal is the same - support human judgment, elevate the role of humans, and help them do more of what they do best - connecting with their communities and getting funds efficiently to where they are most needed. That is and will always be the governing principle behind everything we do with AI." — Stephen Tyler, Chief Technology Officer, Foundant

Availability

Fia is currently in beta with its initial group of early-adopter organizations and was demonstrated to a large audience of current Foundant clients last month. Longer term, Fia is designed to operate independently of Foundant's other products, so organizations will not need to be a current Foundant client, or on any particular license tier, to access it once it becomes more broadly available. While the early-adopter program is full, Foundant is excited to bring this to more organizations across the social good sector. To stay in the loop as Fia continues to evolve and becomes more widely available, sign up for updates on Foundant’s website: foundant.com/fia

Fia is one part of Foundant's broader AI strategy, which also includes AI features built directly into its products — such as AI-driven application analysis and scoring and AI summarization — and MCP Connectors that let clients securely connect their Foundant data to AI tools they already use, including Claude and Copilot.

About Foundant

Foundant is an Engine for Good — providing the software, service, and community of more than 4,000 clients that grantmakers, scholarship providers, community foundations, research and government funders, and other social-good organizations rely on to manage the full lifecycle of grants, scholarships, and donor relationships. Its products include CommunitySuite, GivingData, Grant Lifecycle Manager (GLM), Scholarship Lifecycle Manager (SLM), SmartSimple, and now Fia solutions. Learn more at foundant.com.

Media Contact: Kristin Laird, Director, Brand Communications, Foundant — kristin.laird@foundant.com