How much did Breakthrough Energy Foundation grant in FY2024?

Breakthrough Energy Foundation reported 147 grants totaling $101,832,574 in its FY2024 IRS filing.

Where is Breakthrough Energy Foundation based?

Breakthrough Energy Foundation is based in WA.

Breakthrough Energy Foundation

Foundation Dossiers Also receives grants — funding profile →

· Public charity

Breakthrough Energy Foundation

Breakthrough Energy is accelerating transformation by supporting cutting-edge research and development, investing in companies that turn green ideas into clean products, and advocating for policies that speed innovation from lab to market.

$102M

Granted FY2024

147

Grants

Communities

$10M

Largest

01What you fund

0164% classified

What you funded, over time

Every grant clustered by its grantee’s IRS cause code (NTEE), by year — across FY2021–2024.

Environment$102MPhilanthropy$22MCommunity Improvement$13MInternational$10MEducation$9.8MCivil Rights$6.4MPublic Benefit$5.1MScience & Tech$4.5MSocial Science$2.6MOther$107M

02beneath the categories

Past the labels — and the year it shifted

Beneath the NTEE codes, this is what the grant descriptions actually say.

…and in their own words, year by year

2021

standardsopen sourcesource modelingjobsfellowship r&dindustrialunion

2022

explorerfellowship r&dhydrogen hubsclimate implementationbuildingsreformspreserve

2023

cleantech r&dimplementationensureaireffectivereducelives

Words distinctive to each year’s grant purposes (TF-IDF) · event-driven terms in cyan.

03FY2024 · 147 grants

Where the money goes

Your grants by size, and where they go.

By grant size · FY2024

Under $10k2 grants · $14k
$10k–50k18 grants · $468k
$50k–250k65 grants · $8.2M
$250k+62 grants · $63M

$200,000

Median grant

States reached

$75M

Total assets

Largest grants

RF CATALYTIC CAPITAL INC$10,306,054
MULTIPLIER$5,000,000
BREAKTHROUGH ENERGY ACTION$4,021,314
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO$2,500,000
ROCKY MOUNTAIN INSTITUTE$2,105,050
MARS MATERIALS INC$2,062,015
GREAT PLAINS INSTITUTE FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT$1,750,000
AIKIDO TECHNOLOGIES INC$1,687,260
TAKACHAR$1,571,129
THIRD WAY INSTITUTE$1,480,000
HGEN$1,458,165
CHEMFINITY$1,312,333
CONDUIT TECH INC$1,308,386
PHASE BIOLABS INC$1,269,221
CLEARPATH INC$1,238,520

02The need

Do your dollars go where the need is?

Each grant placed by the hardship in its grantee’s ZIP, then read against the area’s typical level.

show:

Your human-services grants (FY21–24, $185k) land where the poverty rate runs at 9% — the area typically sits at 9%. 32% of those dollars reach neighborhoods with above-average need. Your grants skew toward lower-need ZIPs.

grant to an above-average-need area below average· circle size = grant amount

Matched: human-services grants are those whose grantee’s IRS cause code is Human Services. Placed by people below the poverty line in the grantee’s ZIP, averaged from the tracts in that ZIP; grantee ZIP can differ from where services are delivered.

US grants placed by each grantee’s ZIP, which can differ from where services are actually delivered. Need from public data — U.S. Census/ACS, CDC PLACES, Eviction Lab, USDA, United Way ALICE — shown as context about the area, never attributed to your giving.

Where the work is directed

The same grants, placed two ways — where each recipient sits, and where its stated purpose earmarks the money.

About 5% of Breakthrough Energy Foundation’s grant dollars are earmarked, by their stated purpose, for a different county than the recipient’s own address — money that lands at a nonprofit in one place but is meant to do its work in another.

Breakthrough Energy Foundationlessmore of its giving

Placed by recipient address · 6.0% directed abroad (not shown)

Recipient view: each grant at its grantee’s ZIP, mapped to a county. Directed view: each grant at the county its stated purpose names, falling back to the recipient’s county when the purpose names no place; US grants only. A county shows only if it carries the top 95% of that view’s dollars. Purposes are read from the foundation’s own 990 grant descriptions.

03Your edge

repeat funding

Who you back again

Which organizations you funded more than once, and which you funded a single time. Each grantee is matched to its own filings.

81%of every dollar goes to organizations you’ve funded before.

$228M · 99 repeat orgs$54M to everyone else

And the relationships you keep tend to grow: grantees you re-up on have seen median revenue of +102% since the first grant, against +68% for the ones you funded once.

99 repeat relationships — 77 still active in FY2024, 22 since wound down; 48 grantees were first funded in FY2024 (too recent to call).

How the two cohorts compare

Re-uppedFunded once

Organizations

Total granted

$228M

$38M

Median revenue growth · since first grant

+102%

+68%

Still filing today

67%

70%

New vs renewed · share of each year

In FY2024, 78% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $16M went to new ones.

RenewedFirst-time

Where new relationships form · theme of each grantee’s first grant

EnvironmentEducationScience & TechCommunity ImprovementPublic BenefitPhilanthropyOther

First-time = a grantee’s first year in your filing window; renewed = funded in an earlier year too. As a portfolio matures the renewed share naturally climbs — once funded, an org stays “renewable” — so the signal is the years that buck it (a new-grantee intake wave). The earliest year is left-censored: relationships that predate the data read as “new.” Theme is the grantee’s IRS cause.

Backed again, and grew

RC
RF CATALYTIC CAPITAL INC
2× · 2023–2024 · $19M · revenue +2383%
Windward Fund
2× · 2021–2024 · $15M · revenue +2336%
MULTIPLIER
3× · 2022–2024 · $11M · revenue +264%

Funded once

CI
Climate Imperative Foundationgraduated
one grant, 2021 · $10M · revenue +228%
CJ
CLIMATE JOBS NATIONAL RESOURCE CENTER INCgraduated
one grant, 2022 · $6.8M · revenue +2986% · 84% of their budget
CE
Clean Energy Buyers Association (fmly REBA)graduated
one grant, 2021 · $2.7M · revenue +172% · 32% of their budget

Repeat = funded in two or more distinct years; growth and survival are read from each grantee’s own subsequent IRS filings.

04Your field

The map has a center of gravity: the average direction from the rest of the sector toward the organizations the foundation funds — the shape of its giving. Scoring every nonprofit along that direction surfaces the ones that look most like the portfolio. These are the closest matchesthat aren’t grantees — a resemblance in what they say they do, not a recommendation.

Coalition for Green Capital

To halt climate change by accelerating investment in clean energy technologies.

Environment

The Climate Group Inc

Climate group brings together networks of international businesses and governments to shift markets toward the goal of a world of net zero carbon emissions by 2050, with greater prosperity for all.

Environment

The Climate Center

The Climate Center is a climate and energy policy nonprofit working to rapidly reduce climate pollution at scale, starting in California.

Education

Environmental and Energy Study Institute

Educate policymakers about equitable science-based solutions for climate, energy, & the environment

—

Center for Energy and Environment

The Center for Energy and Environment (CEE) is a clean energy nonprofit with decades of special expertise in energy efficiency. Working in homes, buildings, and communities, CEE discovers and deploys the most effective energy solutions to…

Environment

Clean Energy Transition Institute

To accelerate an equitable clean energy transition in the Northwest by producing unbiased research and analysis framing economic decarbonization strategies and convening stakeholders to debate the tradeoffs in building the clean energy…

Education

National Caucus of Environmental

The national caucus of environmental legislators empowers a nonpartisan network of legislative champions to protect, conserve, and improve the natural and human environment.

Education

E3G Third Generation Environmentalism

E3g is a leading international not-for-profit think tank specialising in climate diplomacy harnessing expertise in the politics and economics of climate change.

Environment

CarbonPlan

We work collaboratively to build open tools and resources for the evaluation and deployment of robust climate programs. We share analyses through public communication and collaboration with journalists in order to foster effective climate…

Environment

Clean Energy Group Inc

Clean Energy Group promotes effective clean energy policies, develops low carbon technology innovation strategies and promotes new financial tools to strengthen the economy and stabilize climate change.

Environment

National Council for Science and

To improve the scientific basis of environmental decision-making. when decision-making processes utilize the latest science, the resulting solutions to environmental challenges are better for people and the planet. operating in the…

Environment

Terraset

Terraset mission is to reduce greenhouse gases by identifying and supporting the most promising early-stage initiatives that are effectively removing carbon from the air.

Environment

For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Climate Leadership Council Inc and the most unlike its peers is Institute of Gas Technology. Resemblance is measured on each organization’s own IRS 990 mission text; it reflects how work is described, not its quality or impact.

For each theme you fund, this compares how the sector’s money is shifting with how your own giving is shifting.

the sector your giving your giving is ahead of the sector the sector’s ahead of you· dot size = how much the theme matters to each side

Ordered by the change in your giving — leaning in on top, pulling back at the bottom. The bar between the two dots is how out of step you are with the sector. Hover any row for detail.

Sector change and giving change are each shown relative to their own range, growing (right) or shrinking (left); both normalized, so inflation isn’t mistaken for growth.

Your grantees are a median of 24 years old; the field is 16. You back the established end — and your money leans older still.

The field is 22% startups (under 5 years old) — 8% of your grantees by number, and just 3% of your money.

Closures · last 5 years

The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.0% lost their exemption, against 11% of the field you don’t fund.

orgs you fund

0.0%0/200

the rest of the field

11%

206,164/1,819,365

Age = years since IRS exemption (a founding proxy). “Closed” = auto-revocation for 3 years of non-filing — a floor on closure, not proof, and bigger established orgs lapse least. Association, not causation.

06the grantee network

128 grantees, every filing reconciled, 2017–2025.

Each one resolved to its own IRS returns and tracked year by year — your grant beside their revenue.

Load-bearing (≥25% of a budget)

Early backer (in before they grew)

128/128

Grantees still filing

115/128

Grew since you first funded

Where your money sits — by cause, then by grantee

Other$119,200,265Environment$101,571,957Philanthropy$21,721,838Community Improvement$12,640,779International$10,457,462Education$9,816,560Civil Rights$6,445,870

Each org by its size and your share of it — top-left is where you’re load-bearing

Go grantee by grantee — a decade per org, and how each moved after you funded them

A decade per grantee — revenue shaded, your grants as bars, all rows on one timeline.

The grantmakers whose grantees overlap with yours far more than size alone predicts. Each orbits closer the stronger the alignment; the arcs between them show where they also fund each other. Here it reads as a tightly interlocked camp — most of these funders back each other's grantees too.

United States Energy FoundationCA55.5× affinity29 shared granteesties to 11 of 11Hover any node to trace its alignments.Compare side by side →

Open a dossier: United States Energy Foundation · Climateworks Foundation · The Energy Foundation · The William & Flora Hewlett Foundation · Climate Imperative Foundation · Environmental Defense Fund Incorporated · John D and Catherine T Macarthur · Multiplier · Bernard and Anne Spitzer · Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston Inc · The McKnight Foundation · Deployus Inc

Affinity is a Gamma-Poisson posterior co-funding rate, re-centered on the typical rate, so thin evidence shrinks toward no signal. A research starting point: overlap is association, not proof of shared intent.

Government reliance of your grantees

Every dot is one organisation Breakthrough Energy Foundation funds. Left–right is the share of its income from government; up–down is the share from you. Bigger dots raise more. Filter to federal or a single department — and drag the year to watch it move.

2024

’20’21’22’23’24

no gov moneyreceives it· size = income

12get no government money at all

0rely on government for over half their income

typical government reliance, FY20–24

Government income is each org’s traced federal awards (USASpending — grants and contracts) plus state payments (open checkbooks) as a share of its total revenue (IRS Form 990); the self-reported government-grant line (990 line 1e) is carried for cross-check. An association, not a claim that your grant caused the public funding. Coverage is precision-first — a floor, not a census; state records exist for 9 states, so a grantee outside them shows no state figure (dimmed) rather than a false zero. Federal award amounts are obligations, which can span years, so a single-year share is indicative. 990 filings lag 12–24 months.

05Through Plinth

Through Plinth

Your grantmaking, live and operational

This dossier was generated cold from public filings. In Plinth it’s a working system — every applicant assessed and every grant monitored. Here’s a taste, run on one of your grantees: NREL FOUNDATION.

Agentic due diligence · confidence × risk

Financial management

low risk

~7 months of operating runway; revenue grew over 4 filed years.

Track record & reputation

medium risk

4 years of Form 990 filings, still active; revenue up +51% since.

Legal standing

low risk

US 501(c)(3); EIN 863498248 on file with current IRS Form 990 filings.

Governance

Live in Plinth

Board composition & governance documents — verified live in Plinth from the applicant.

Compliance & sanctions

Live in Plinth

OFAC / UN sanctions screening — run live in Plinth at assessment.

Program capacity

Live in Plinth

Staffing, M&E and activity alignment — assessed live in Plinth from submitted proposals.

Live · Plinth’s real DD engine

Run the actual assessment on NREL FOUNDATION, cold from public data.

Generated live from public IRS filings + open web sources by Plinth’s agentic engine. Shown as an illustration of the product, not a formal assessment.

Post-award monitoring · continuous checks

On trackFinancial stability— Roughly 7 months of cash on hand.
On trackSustained operations— Filing through 2024; revenue grew over the period.
WatchReliance on your funding— Your grants peaked at 94% of their budget — load-bearing; a dependency Plinth would track.
Awaiting reportEvidence of delivery— Plinth collects the grantee's own monitoring reports post-award.

What you see here is static and public. In Plinth it’s operational — the full six-pillar framework on every applicant (with their own documents + live registry and sanctions checks), monitoring dashboards on every award, custom board reports, and eligibility routing for intake.

Agentic due diligenceMonitoring dashboardsCustom board reportsEligibility routing

Preview generated from this grantee’s public IRS filings and independent reporting. Pillars marked “live in Plinth” require the applicant’s submitted documents. Shown as illustration, not a formal assessment.

Warm introductions · Powered by PlinthPro

How do I get to Breakthrough Energy Foundation?

Find your warmest path to Breakthrough Energy Foundation through people who sit on both boards. Search for your organization and Plinth traces the introduction across shared trustees and officers.

Every link is a documented governance overlap in public IRS 990 filings — not a personal network — and each hop carries its own confidence tier. Low-confidence or distant paths are held back rather than guessed.

Breakthrough Energy Foundation

What you funded, over time

Past the labels — and the year it shifted

Where the money goes

Do your dollars go where the need is?

Where the work is directed

Who you back again

Backed again, and grew

Funded once

128 grantees, every filing reconciled, 2017–2025.

Government reliance of your grantees

Your grantmaking, live and operational

How do I get to Breakthrough Energy Foundation?

More from the funding graph

Breakthrough Energy Foundation

What you funded, over time

Past the labels — and the year it shifted

Where the money goes

Do your dollars go where the need is?

Where the work is directed

Who you back again

Backed again, and grew

Funded once

128 grantees, every filing reconciled, 2017–2025.

Government reliance of your grantees

Your grantmaking, live and operational

How do I get to Breakthrough Energy Foundation?

More from the funding graph