· Public charity
Founders Pledge Inc
Founders pledge, inc.
What you funded, over time
Every grant placed by its stated purpose and the recipient’s mission, by year — across FY2017–2024.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
The 102 grants below total $26,259,981 — the rows itemised in this filing. The $30,147,500 headline is the total grant expense reported on the return, so the remaining $3,887,519 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 $10k7 grants · $42k
- $10k–50k37 grants · $852k
- $50k–250k33 grants · $3.8M
- $250k+25 grants · $22M
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| DEPLOYUS | $8,925,000 |
| CENTER FOR ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE SAFETY INC | $1,096,000 |
| THE RAND CORPORATION | $1,000,000 |
| PLAYERS PHILANTHROPY FUND | $804,000 |
| SANGRO INC (DBA ASHGRO) | $741,500 |
| PALISADE RESEARCH | $726,000 |
| MATS RESEARCH INC | $584,000 |
| LONGVIEW PHILANTHROPY USA | $562,000 |
| SAFE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE FORUM INSTITUTE | $540,000 |
| JOHNS HOPKINS - CENTER FOR HEALTH SECURITY (CHS) | $539,757 |
| AI OBJECTIVES INSTITUTE | $538,000 |
| RESTORINGVISION | $531,000 |
| RETHINK PRIORITIES | $520,000 |
| EFFECTIVE VENTURES FOUNDATION USA | $510,000 |
| THE FOUNDATION FOR AMERICAN INNOVATION (LINCOLN NETWORK) | $493,000 |
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.
Your human-services grants (FY17–24, $1.9M) land where the poverty rate runs at 12%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 99% of those 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
Grants abroad, by region — $3.8M on the FY2024 return
Schedule F, as filed: 3 regions. The IRS asks for region and purpose, not the recipient, so no country or grantee can be named here.
Stated purpose: FUND CHARITABLE ACTIVITIES
Stated purpose: FUND CHARITABLE ACTIVITIES
Stated purpose: FUND CHARITABLE ACTIVITIES
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.
Where the work is directed
The same grants, placed two ways — where each recipient sits, and where its stated purpose earmarks the money.
About 9% of Founders Pledge Inc’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.
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 +64% since the first grant, against 0% for the ones you funded once.
71 repeat relationships — 32 still active in FY2024, 39 since wound down; 63 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, 64% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $8.9M 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
- DIDEPLOYUS INC2× · 2023–2024 · $9.8M · revenue +282% · 55% of their budget
- CFCENTER FOR APPLIED RATIONALITY3× · 2020–2022 · $4.3M · revenue +172% · 59% of their budget
- ARALIGNMENT RESEARCH CENTER3× · 2022–2024 · $4.2M · revenue +17% · 49% of their budget
Funded once
- TETSINGHUA EDUCATION FOUNDATION NA INCone grant, 2023 · $2.5M · revenue -86%
- UTUKRAINE TRUSTCHAINone grant, 2023 · $2.3M · revenue -44% · 36% of their budget
- CFCENTER FOR APPLIED RATIONALITYone grant, 2023 · $1.9M
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.
Bringing diverse voices together across global sectors, disciplines, and demographics so developments in ai advance positive outcomes for people and society.
A nonprofit scientific research organization that develops vaccines and antibodies for hiv, tuberculosis, and emerging infectious diseases.
Transluce is an independent research lab that builds open, scalable technology for understanding ai systems and steering them in the public interest.
The open markets institute works to help people relearn how to use competition policy to build stronger democracies, more just and equitable societies, more innovative and sustainable economies, and a more secure and peaceful world.
We help the public by foreseeing and reacting to globally impactful and existential catastrophes. We forecast near-term risks, detect black swans earlier, and deploy our emergency response team to take mitigating action.
Improving the transparency and scientific integrity of climate solutions through open data and tools.
To improve the lives of people through innovative scientific and engineering research.
Finreglab is a d.c.-based research organization working at the intersection of financial innovation and public policy. our mission is to advance technology and data use to help people and small businesses manage their financial lives,…
Wri is committed to creating change that improves people's lives and ensures the natural world can thrive. (see schedule o)wri's bold vision requires a formula for success we call "count it. change it. scale it.":- count it: our work is…
Using legal advocacy to make advances in science and technology safer for people and the planet.
The foreign policy research institute (frpi) is dedicated to producing the highest quality scholarship and nonpartisan policy analysis focused on crucial foreign policy and national security challenges facing the united states. we educate…
To provide accurate, objective information and analysis on international strategic issues for legislators, diplomats, foreign affairs analysts, international business leaders, economists, the military, defense commentators, journalists,…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Evidence Action and the most unlike its peers is Radicalxchange Foundation Ltd. 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 13 years old; the field is 16. You back the younger end — and your money leans older still.
The field is 22% startups (under 5 years old) — 14% of your grantees by number, and just 22% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.4% 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.
220 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. 220 of the 294 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 DEPLOYUS INC ↗
- Who funds CENTER FOR APPLIED RATIONALITY ↗
- Who funds ALIGNMENT RESEARCH CENTER ↗
- Who funds BERKELEY EXISTENTIAL RISK INITIATIVE ↗
- Who funds NATIONAL PHILANTHROPIC TRUST ↗
- Who funds TSINGHUA EDUCATION FOUNDATION NA INC ↗
- Who funds PLAYERS PHILANTHROPY FUND INC ↗
- Who funds UKRAINE TRUSTCHAIN ↗
- Who funds FAR AI INC ↗
- Who funds Center for AI Safety Inc ↗
- Who funds MACHINE INTELLIGENCE RESEARCH INSTITUTE INC ↗
- Who funds EFFECTIVE VENTURES FOUNDATION USA INC ↗
- Who funds TOPOS INSTITUTE ↗
- Who funds ALLFED INSTITUTE ↗
- Who funds Polaris Research Institute Inc ↗
- Who funds TERRAPRAXIS INC ↗
- Who funds Massachusetts Institute of Technology ↗
- Who funds Rethink Priorities ↗
- Who funds The Rand Corporation ↗
- Who funds THE ENERGY FOR GROWTH HUB INC ↗
- Who funds Carnegie Mellon University ↗
- Who funds RETHINK CHARITY ↗
- Who funds SECUREBIO INC ↗
- Who funds COMMUNITY FOUNDATION BOULDER COUNTY ↗
- Who funds Center for Innovative Governance Research ↗
- Who funds ASHGRO INC ↗
- Who funds Palisade Research ↗
- Who funds CONVERGENCE ANALYSIS ↗
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: Effective Ventures Foundation USA Inc · Good Ventures Foundation · Silicon Valley Community Foundation · Every Org · Rethink Charity · Manifold for Charity Inc · Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative · Daffy Charitable Fund · Laidir Foundation · Marin Community Foundation · Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco the Peninsula Marin & Sonoma · Mercatus Center 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 organization Founders Pledge Inc 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
- Third Sector Capital Partners Inc — 16% of income from government
- Johns Hopkins University — 12% of income from government
- Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University Inc — 3% of income from government
- Digital Harbor Foundation — 2% of income from government
- Partners in Health a Nonprofit Corporation — 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 Founders Pledge Inc?
Find your warmest path to Founders Pledge Inc 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.