· Private foundation
Breakthrough Prize Foundation
Its FY2025 filing reports that it accepted unsolicited grant applications.
What you funded, over time
Every grant placed by its stated purpose and the recipient’s mission, by year — across FY2020–2025.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2025
- $10k–50k5 grants · $114k
- $50k–250k14 grants · $1.1M
- $250k+8 grants · $12M
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| Individual grant recipient | $3,000,000 |
| Individual grant recipient | $3,000,000 |
| INTERNATIONAL RESCUE COMMITTEE (IRC) | $1,570,000 |
| MILKY WAY RESEARCH FOUNDATION | $1,225,271 |
| MILKY WAY RESEARCH FOUNDATION | $1,125,025 |
| AIRBNBORG | $1,000,000 |
| MILKY WAY RESEARCH FOUNDATION | $466,881 |
| Individual grant recipient | $250,000 |
| ARID1B RESEARCH FOUNDATION INC | $150,000 |
| Individual grant recipient | $100,000 |
| BLUE VALLEY HIGH SCHOOL | $100,000 |
| Individual grant recipient | $100,000 |
| Individual grant recipient | $100,000 |
| NEEV ACADEMY | $100,000 |
| Individual grant recipient | $100,000 |
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.
Dollar for dollar, your grants (FY21–25) land where the poverty rate runs at 13%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 86% of your dollars go to grantees based in above-average-need neighborhoods. Most of your grants land in higher-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
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.
Where the work is directed
The same grants, placed two ways — where each recipient sits, and where its stated purpose earmarks the money.
About 11% of Breakthrough Prize 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. Read by recipient address, 66% of the giving stays in DC; read by stated purpose it is 64% — less of the work is directed home than the recipients' locations suggest.
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.
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 +78% since the first grant, against +16% for the ones you funded once.
12 repeat relationships — 3 still active in FY2025, 9 since wound down; 22 grantees were first funded in FY2025 (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 FY2025, 42% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $7.5M 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
- MWMILKY WAY RESEARCH FOUNDATION5× · 2021–2025 · $64M · revenue +78% · 100% of their budget
NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES3× · 2022–2024 · $5.4M · revenue +29%- KAKHAN ACADEMY INC3× · 2021–2024 · $400k · revenue +98%
Funded once
UNITED STATES FUND FOR UNICEFone grant, 2024 · $4.0M · revenue +16%- IGIndividual grant recipientone grant, 2023 · $3.0M
- IGIndividual grant recipientone grant, 2024 · $3.0M
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.
The institute for advanced study (the institute) is one of the world's leading centers for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. see schedule o.
As a leading research university with a distinctive commitment to undergraduate education, Rice University aspires to path breaking research, unsurpassed teaching, and contributions to the betterment of our world. It seeks to fulfill this…
Nyu is a private university with approximately 60,000 matriculating students in 20 schools and institutes. nyu's primary missions are education, research and scholarship, and patient care.
Organization's mission: boston university is an international, comprehensive, private research university, committed to educating students to be reflective, resourceful individuals ready to live, adapt, and lead in an interconnected world.…
Our mission is to break down barriers to als research to find effective treatments. by uniting academia, the pharma and biotech industry, government, venture capital, related nonprofits, and the als community, we aim to overcome the…
Undergraduate, graduate, and professional education and research across a broad array of academic domains.
The central mission of the university of southern california is the development of human beings and society as a whole through the cultivation and enrichment of the human mind and spirit. the principal means by which our mission is…
Advance science, engineering, and innovation throughout the world for the benefit of all. the world's largest multidisciplinary scientific society and a leading publisher of cutting-edge research through its science family of journals,…
The museum's mission statement is: "to discover, interpret, and disseminate - through scientific research and education - knowledge about human cultures, the natural world, and the universe."
The principal objects of the University are the advancement of learning by teaching and research, and its dissemination by every means. We work as one Oxford bringing together our staff, students and alumni, our colleges, faculties,…
The weizmann institute of science, located in rehovot, israel, is one of the worlds top-ranking, multidisciplinary research institutions. at any one time, several thousand scientists, staff and students are involved in hundreds of research…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Seti Institute and the most unlike its peers is Milky Way Research Foundation. Resemblance is measured on each organization’s own IRS 990 mission text; it reflects how work is described, not its quality or impact.
17 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. 17 of the 495 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
Showing your 200 largest grantees by grant value.
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 MILKY WAY RESEARCH FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds AIRBNBORG INC ↗
- Who funds CHARITIES AID FOUNDATION AMERICA ↗
- Who funds NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES ↗
- Who funds UNITED STATES FUND FOR UNICEF ↗
- Who funds American National Red Cross & Its Constituent Chapters and Branches ↗
- Who funds International Rescue Committee INC ↗
- Who funds THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds ROCKEFELLER PHILANTHROPY ADVISORS INC ↗
- Who funds American Friends of Tel Aviv Univ ↗
- Who funds KHAN ACADEMY INC ↗
- Who funds Massachusetts Institute of Technology ↗
Government reliance of your grantees
Every dot is one organization Breakthrough Prize 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.
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology — 35% 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 Prize Foundation?
Find your warmest path to Breakthrough Prize 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.