A lengthy career in the finance world has taken Omar Yunus from Peoria to Europe and now back, as he works to grow a startup aimed at helping nonprofit organizations find sustainable funding.
Yunus is a co-founder of Afterfund, a financial technology initiative he started in 2023 with overseas-based partner Dzanan Ganic – with admittedly lofty intentions.
“If we can act proactively, and then we can take our problems and strategically cut them up into little pieces and then fund them forever. We can eradicate poverty; these kinds of issues all over the world,” he said. “It's an incredibly powerful tool, and that's what we're trying to help people do.”
So, how does Afterfund work toward that goal? Yunus says they will partner with other nonprofits to help them use donations in a unique way.
“Instead of just taking a donation and spending it immediately, they place that donation in a fund which is invested, and from the profits of that investment, they provide continuous, long-term funding for different projects,” he said.
“So this really works out very well for the nonprofits, because typically they encounter fundraising issues that make their income flows unreliable, unsteady. It's intermittent and it's very difficult to keep track of. Afterfund helps present them with a model that's much steadier and overall, much more sustainable.”
He says it’s a model that also appeals to donors.
“What we're able to do, broadly speaking, is increase the impact of each donation,” said Yunus. “If one donation, instead of getting spent immediately, can get invested – and then the profits are used over and over and over – we've calculated for at least a couple of our nonprofits that the impact is 35 times greater.
“And over time, it's probably going to get better. In other words, as these nonprofits grow with us, they'll be able to scale, they'll get more efficient, and so those numbers then will increase.”
Afterfund joined the “gBeta” accelerator program at Peoria’s Distillery Labs innovation hub, and finished securing its pre-seed funding round late last year with a diverse group of investors from around the world.
“We were bootstrapped; we could support ourselves, but we didn't have enough money to actually pay other people. And what has happened over the last year is that we have been genuinely overwhelmed with demand,” he said. “We realized very, very quickly that we were going to have to make some hires, that we're going to have to grow in order to keep up with this demand. So this funding is basically going to help us with those hires.”
Omar’s journey
The 43-year-old Yunus was raised in Peoria, attending Northmoor Primary School and what’s now known as Reservoir Gifted Academy before graduating from Washington Community High School after his family relocated.
“I played ice hockey growing up here; I was really big into theater and that kind of stuff. And I also really, really enjoyed science growing up. It was something that fascinated me and enthralled me,” he said.
After attending William & Mary University and going to law school in Chicago, Yunus searched for a career path that would appeal to him.
“I think I am going to major in international relations, instead I majored in biology/biochemistry,” he said. “I think I'm going to go to med school. I turn down med school, I go to law school. I think I'm going to study patent law, then during one of my summer internships, I get into finance at a startup. After that, I'm like, ‘I have to do this,’ because I saw the power of finance and what investing could do.”
That eventually led Yunus to Europe, where he worked on an investment fund in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s capital city, Sarajevo.
“That investment fund allowed me to see the impact of every euro we invested, because I was so deeply involved in that investment fund,” he said. “Because it was focused on such a small community, we were able to help people put food on their table, to send kids to school with the adequate supplies. We revitalized entire communities, and that left a huge impression on me.”
It’s also where he met Ganic about 10 years ago, and where they developed their idea for Afterfund.
“We'd been friends, and we'd been hanging out, and this was something that we were super passionate about,” he said. “We thought, ‘you know, we can continue using investment to make money for rich people, or we can try to eliminate poverty all over the world and get the world in a better place.’”
Yunus said Afterfund already has some success stories in less than two years. They partnered with an Arizona-based nonprofit to help victims of flooding in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and assisted an organization called Chi-Care in providing aid for Chicago’s unhoused community.
“Chi-Care has already had three profit distributions that have fed the homeless since we started working with them,” he said. “In other words, the donations that Afterfund helped raise, were invested and three times – three times – we were able to generate profits that funded their ongoing efforts in Chicago.”
Back to Peoria
With his parents getting older, Yunus decided to return to Peoria so he could be closer to them. He was able to get Afterfund admitted into the gBeta cohort through Distillery Labs and strengthen his local networks.
“I was able to meet so many different people, get a lot of different questions answered, from legal to financial, strategic questions about marketing, because I wasn't a marketing guy. It was just a really, really helpful resource,” he said.
Yunus thinks he and his parents could have relocated elsewhere, and he would’ve been able to develop Afterfund successfully in another U.S. city. But there’s nowhere quite like home.
“I think that Peoria has a lot of unique features that put it on the cusp of doing something really, really great,” he said. “I think the revitalization for Peoria is just one or two deals away, and here's why I think that: We are still a very fertile hotbed of high-end talent – not just in the engineering fields and not just doctors.
“People who are the children of these successful folks, they know about Peoria, and they still come home and visit. I think what the city is doing right now, and what folks like me are trying to do right now, is giving them a reason to stay.”
