Vaki is a reflection of how much each individual act of generosity adds up. Since its creation in 2016, the platform has raised more than 14 million dollars, supported nearly 60,000 social, environmental, business, and political projects, and mobilized more than 500,000 contributors in Colombia, Mexico, and 14 other countries. Just in August 2026, after the earthquake that shook Colombia, more than 50,000 people from 90 countries channeled over 2 million dollars in aid through the platform.
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It all started in 2011, when Nicolás Contreras (Bogotá, 38 years old) was finishing his studies in electronic and industrial engineering at the Universidad de los Andes. For his thesis, he brought wifi networks to three rural schools without connectivity in Boyacá. Seeing the impact it had on the communities, he knew he wanted to help people through technology.
Achieving this was not easy. After selling cell phone cases and Chinese products he imported for months, together with his friend Ricardo Mejía he founded Popcorn, a company that started making soccer apps and ended up becoming a studio that helps other entrepreneurs build their own startups.
At that time, he met Brazilian Raíssa de Mello João (São Paulo, 40 years old) on a trip to Greece. They maintained a long-distance relationship until, in 2015, she moved to Colombia and started working at Popcorn. In October, at a Halloween party, Mello João noticed the difficulties in collecting money from friends: some didn’t have debit or credit cards, nor checkbooks. Others didn’t know how, or didn’t want to, make online transactions; they could only pay in cash and ended up leaving the money at the doorman’s desk. “Why don’t you make a digital ‘vaquinha’?” she suggested. They looked for something like that in Colombia but didn’t find it.
“My wife had the idea and I made it a reality,” says Contreras. Thus, in 2016, La Vaquinha was born: a simple page, with just three buttons, no logo, that worked very well and soon made the leap from collecting party fees to financing social, environmental, or political projects through donations. It was a digital version of the paper Contreras had been handling for decades at parties. “I was always in charge of collecting the money because my friends trusted me and the accounts always balanced,” he says.
In 2018, the platform — already renamed Vaki — hosted “Una vaca por De la Calle,” a volunteer campaign to help former presidential candidate Humberto de la Calle pay off the debts from that campaign. This was its first big viral moment, so big that it almost “crashed” the site due to the high volume of visits. But the founder’s iron determination kept it afloat. “The country was just getting to know crowdfunding; if I had shut down the page, the idea would have ended in Colombia,” he recalls.
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That same year, Canal Uno announced the closure of Noticias Uno due to lack of resources. Its viewers began supporting it with monthly contributions through Vaki, and thus the subscription model now called Vaki Sponsors was born. For Contreras, that was the key moment: it confirmed that a cause, supported on his platform, could indeed move millions of people.
These successes built them a solid reputation that caught the attention of investors in the tech market. In 2019, Sony invited them to Shark Tank Colombia to secure capital and mentorship through the program. Alexander Torrenegra, one of the most recognized Colombian investors in Silicon Valley, was among the guests. After Contreras’ pitch, he decided to invest 70 million pesos to boost Vaki’s growth. “I saw he was a person passionate about solving a problem, beyond simply using technology,” says Torrenegra.
Contreras and Mello João do everything with the same principle: helping with transparency. Vaki blocks the withdrawal of money until confirming that each cause is real, and does not charge a commission on projects related to emergencies, social causes, animals, or foundations, unlike other global schemes. That is, at Vaki 100% of the funds raised go directly to the project. “We want people to be able to freely contribute to causes that move them, with the peace of mind that all their money will indeed reach where they sent it. That’s why we thoroughly review each initiative; if it turns out to be false, we return the money and that’s it,” explains Contreras.
Vaki is perhaps one of the few organizations that can closely see people’s generosity, especially in contexts of tragedy. “Colombia never ceases to surprise me. We came from a battlefield in the elections and put that aside to give way to solidarity. Colombians are that friend who is always there to chip in when needed,” he says.
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