Teamfi crowdfunding platform started by LHS grads

By Justin Tiemeyer

Contributing writer

14 May 2025

Kanon Dean is the son of former Lowell High School Football Coach, Noel Dean, the same Noel Dean responsible for the cancer funding organization, Pink Arrow Pride, but his own sports accomplishments are nothing to shake a stick at. Kanon wrestled for Harvard University after performing as both a wrestler and a football player at LHS.

These days, Kanon is still in the environs of sports, though he has passed the ball, so to speak, off to other young athletes. His company, Teamfi, has free fundraising software for sports teams and groups of every stripe.

The difference between the popular fundraising platform GoFundMe and Teamfi is that the former typically focuses on individual campaigns, whereas, the latter focuses on teams and organizations.

“When you donate on our app, all the money goes back to the team,” Kanon said. “Organizations are easier to trust. You feel like you’ve de-risked a little. If you’re asked to donate to a person, you’re really voting, ‘Do I trust that person with the money?’”

With a Teamfi campaign, there is a school, a booster group, or a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit securing every pledge, an entity that you can research and find public information about their track record (pun intended).

Teamfi provides groups with an individual page, where potential donors can read about what they are being asked to support, and a donate button, similar to Venmo.

Kanon is a financial analyst by trade, and making apps is part of his job. In his free time, Kanon uses his skills to develop other types of apps. Prior to Teamfi, he created Goose Poop, for example, which attempts to simplify the way football teams qualify for playoffs in Michigan, using a playoffs wizard. Why Goose Poop? “It’s my childhood nickname,” Kanon said. “I didn’t know what to call it.”

Kanon is joined on Teamfi by his brother, Zeth Dean, who works as a web designer. Zeth works on the front end; the web site, the app, the user interface, making sure everything looks good and the flow is intuitive, while Kanon works on the back end; the architecture, the code, the function behind the form.

Teamfi began when Noel, while coaching on the other side of the state, wanted to run a fundraiser, and he found he was losing a ton of money in fees. Noel knew of Kanon and Zeth’s skills, so he reached out to them to see if they had a solution. “It wasn’t really a business at that point,” Kanon said. “It was just an experiment.”

After designing the app for his father, Kanon reached out to LHS Wrestling Coach, R.J. Boudro, to see if he would be interested in trying Teamfi out, and Boudro said, “Yeah, absolutely.”

With these two successes, Kanon had two initial data points to show that Teamfi worked, and those two data points were enough to convince him to introduce the app to the rest of the world.

Teamfi markets itself toward nonprofits, but they are open to fundraising for club teams, as well. For example, Amateur Athletic Union, or AAU, basketball teams may not be nonprofit, but their needs for fundraising are just as real. The main difference is that Teamfi is not interested in doing fundraisers for normal, for-profit businesses.

“We work with a lot of churches right now, work with bands, adult interest groups, done a few of those,” Kanon said. “We don’t do political stuff. We don’t do hate speech. You try to use your best judgment. You try to eyeball it to say, ‘Is this something Teamfi wants to support?”

On Monday, March 31, 2025, Teamfi turned two years old, and as the platform ages, Kanon also wants it to grow. For example, as part of the current suite of options, Teamfi does “-athons” now, like “free-throw-athons,” for example, where donors can pledge per unit, and the newest product is a calendar fundraiser, where donors put their name on a day, and the pledges keep getting higher and higher. The first pays $1, the second $2, and so on, based on the day they choose to pledge for. “It keeps the fun in fundraising,” Kanon said.

Teamfi may be a fundraising company looking for new, innovative ways to fundraise digitally, but it is also a product of the Lowell community. It started in Lowell for Lowell teams, specifically LHS wrestling; Lowell coaches have helped Kanon and Zeth build and tweak it, and with Teamfi, the Dean family (famous for sports excellence and cancer support through Pink Arrow Pride) continues to put Lowell on the map as a place of empathy and mutual support.