· Public charity
Breakthrough Energy Foundation
Working with our world-class network of innovators, business and industry leaders, and policy experts, we accelerate the innovation of climate technologies at every stage - from discovery to development to deployment.
What you funded, over time
Every grant placed by its stated purpose and the recipient’s mission, by year — across FY2021–2024.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
The 149 grants below total $71,865,100 — the rows itemised in this filing. The $101,832,574 headline is the total grant expense reported on the return, so the remaining $29,967,474 is giving the schedule does not break out: grants under the $5,000 itemisation floor, grants to individuals, and grants reported on other schedules. Every figure below describes the itemised rows only.
By grant size · FY2024
- Under $10k2 grants · $14k
- $10k–50k18 grants · $468k
- $50k–250k67 grants · $8.4M
- $250k+62 grants · $63M
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| 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 |
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.
Your human-services grants (FY22–24, $175k) land where the poverty rate runs at 9%, against an area that typically sits at 9%. 29% of those dollars go to grantees based in above-average-need neighborhoods. Your grants skew toward lower-need ZIPs.
Matched: human-services grants are those whose grantee’s IRS cause code is Human Services. Placed by people below the poverty linein the grantee’s ZIP, averaged from the tracts in that ZIP; grantee ZIP can differ from where services are delivered.
Which US states your grants reach
Grants abroad, by region — $28M on the FY2024 return
Schedule F, as filed: 4 regions, $27M to organizations and $1.3M to individuals. The IRS asks for region and purpose, not the recipient, so no country or grantee can be named here.
Stated purpose: POLICY IMPLEMENTATION · INNOVATION PARTNERSHIP · CLEANTECH R&D
Stated purpose: CLEANTECH R&D · ECOSYSTEM GRANT · CONTRAIL SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH
Stated purpose: CLEANTECH R&D · ECOSYSTEM GRANT
Stated purpose: Fellowship Stipend
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 — shown as context about the area, never attributed to your giving. Grants abroad on Schedule F are filed by region, purpose and amount with no recipient name, so they are shown by region and cannot be placed on the country map or matched to a grantee.
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.
And the relationships you keep tend to grow: grantees you re-up on have seen median revenue of +29% since the first grant, against +11% for the ones you funded once.
91 repeat relationships — 73 still active in FY2024, 18 since wound down; 45 grantees were first funded in FY2024 (too recent to call).
How the two cohorts compare
Organizations
Total granted
Median revenue growth · since first grant
Still filing today
New vs renewed · share of each year
In FY2024, 78% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $15M went to new ones.
Where new relationships form · theme of each grantee’s first grant
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
MULTIPLIER3× · 2022–2024 · $11M · revenue +17%
Rocky Mountain Institute3× · 2022–2024 · $9.5M · revenue +50%- GPGREAT PLAINS INSTITUTE FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT INC3× · 2022–2024 · $6.5M · revenue +61% · 28% of their budget
Funded once
- CJCLIMATE JOBS NATIONAL RESOURCE CENTER INCgraduatedone grant, 2022 · $6.8M · revenue +91% · 84% of their budget
- TWTHIRD WAYone grant, 2022 · $2.1M · revenue +16%
- MPMISSION POSSIBLE PARTNERSHIP USA INCgraduatedone grant, 2022 · $1.2M · revenue ×19
Repeat = funded in two or more distinct years; growth and survival are read from each grantee’s own subsequent IRS filings.
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.
Climate group advances climate action by mobilizing business and government leadership to drive systemic decarbonization across energy, transport, and industry, while engaging the public through large-scale convenings and global platforms.…
Working with our world-class network of innovators, business and industry leaders, and policy experts, we accelerate the innovation of climate technologies at every stage - from discovery to development to deployment.
Climate catalyst sparks collective action to tackle the biggest climate challenges we face today: cutting emissions in heavy industries.
The national caucus of environmental legislators empowers a nonpartisan network of legislative champions to protect, conserve, and improve the natural and human environment.
Cgc operates as a nonprofit financial institution that invests directly and through partners to transform financial markets by using public and private investing to accelerate the deployment of projects that strengthen the grid, reduce…
Improving the transparency and scientific integrity of climate solutions through open data and tools.
The Climate Center is a climate and energy policy nonprofit working to rapidly reduce climate pollution at scale, starting in California.
The climate institute is organized for the purpose of educating the general public and policy makers as to the gravity of potential climate change, exploring the policy implications of the latest scientific findings on climate modelling…
Shape and drive bold policy solutions to achieve equitable carbon-neutral economies.
To raise awareness about the potential to reduce environmental harm by shifting electricity use to particular times; to encourage the development and spread of common protocols for this practice.
Competitive enterprise institute (cei) is a non-profit public policy organization dedicated to the principles of free enterprise and limited government. we believe that consumers are best helped not by government regulation but by being…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Clearpath Inc and the most unlike its peers is National Wildlife Federation. 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.
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 4% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.0% lost their exemption, against 13% of the field you don’t fund.
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.
119 grantees tracked through their own filings, 2017–2025.
Each one resolved to its own IRS returns and tracked year by year — your grant beside their revenue from every source. Association, dated; never a causal claim.
Counted here: distinct organizations you funded across 2017–2025, not grant rows in a single year — so this will not match the grant count on the cover. 119 of the 189 grantees resolved in that span have returns of their own we could reconcile; the rest are funded organizations whose filings we could not track year by year.
Where your money sits — by cause, then by grantee
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.
- Who funds RF CATALYTIC CAPITAL INC ↗
- Who funds MULTIPLIER ↗
- Who funds Rocky Mountain Institute ↗
- Who funds CLIMATE JOBS NATIONAL RESOURCE CENTER INC ↗
- Who funds GREAT PLAINS INSTITUTE FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT INC ↗
- Who funds NREL Foundation ↗
- Who funds NATURAL RESOURCES DEFENSE COUNCIL INC ↗
- Who funds THIRD WAY INSTITUTE ↗
- Who funds Breakthrough Energy Action Inc ↗
- Who funds Resources for the Future Inc ↗
- Who funds CLEAN AIR TASK FORCE INC ↗
- Who funds The Breakthrough Institute ↗
- Who funds FEDERATION OF AMERICAN SCIENTISTS ↗
- Who funds EFI FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds University of Chicago ↗
- Who funds CLEARPATH INC ↗
- Who funds CLIMATEWORKS FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds CENTER FOR CLIMATE AND ENERGY SOLUTIONS INC ↗
- Who funds NATIONAL WILDLIFE FEDERATION ↗
- Who funds WORLD RESOURCES INSTITUTE ↗
- Who funds ENVIRONMENTAL DEFENSE FUND INCORPORATED ↗
- Who funds THIRD WAY ↗
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.
Open a dossier: Climateworks Foundation · United States Energy Foundation · The William & Flora Hewlett Foundation · The Energy Foundation · Environmental Defense Fund Incorporated · Climate Imperative Foundation · Bernard and Anne Spitzer Charitable Trust · John D and Catherine T Macarthur Foundation · Multiplier · Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston Inc · The Heising-Simons Foundation · Sequoia Climate Foundation
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 organization 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.
- New Buildings Institute — 100% of income from government
- Health Effects Institute — 39% of income from government
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology — 35% of income from government
- The Trustees of Princeton University — 11% of income from government
- Consensus Building Institute Inc — 4% of income from government
- Greentown Collaborative Inc — 0% of income from government
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: a grantee that reports government grants we could not trace to a source is left off the chart rather than shown as receiving none. 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.
Warm introductions · Powered by PlinthPlus
How do I get to Breakthrough Energy Foundation?
Find your warmest path to Breakthrough Energy Foundation through trustees and officers whose names appear on both boards. Search for your organization and Plinth traces the shortest route it can evidence.
Each link is a name appearing on two organizations’ public IRS 990 filings, matched on that name and, where the filings support it, on location. A same-state match has geographic support, which is a second matching feature rather than confirmation that the two are one person; a cross-state one is the likeliest to be two people who share a name. Every hop shows its tier, low-confidence and distant paths are held back rather than guessed, and it is worth confirming the person before you use the introduction.