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Nevada · Public charity

Lightcone Foundation

To serve as a charitable and educational organization, supporting the charitable mission of the future of life foundation, primarily via grantmaking.

$12M
Granted FY2023
5
Grants FY2023
4
Organizations funded FY2023
Read the full brief
Median grant, FY2023
$2,250,000
Largest grant, FY2023
$4,250,000
States reached, FY2023
3
Total assets, FY2023
$174M
100% classified

What it funded, over time

Every grant placed by its stated purpose and the recipient’s mission, by year, FY2022 to 2023.

Philanthropy$12MScience & Tech$6.0MArts & Culture$3.8MCivil Rights$40k

Top grantees

Largest recipients by total granted, FY2023 to FY2023, and the share of each one’s budget the grants supplied at peak.

GranteeTotal grantedYearsShare of their budget
Future of Life Institute$4,250,000290%
Improve the News Foundation$3,845,000265%
Beneficial Ai Foundation$1,765,000295%
Civil Liberties Foundation$40,0001100%

Compare Lightcone Foundation with peer funders

Warm introductions · Powered by PlinthPlus

How do I get to Lightcone Foundation?

Find your warmest path to Lightcone 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.

About Lightcone Foundation

How much does Lightcone Foundation give?
Lightcone Foundation reported 5 grants totaling $12,150,000 in its FY2023 IRS filing.
What does Lightcone Foundation fund?
By grant dollars over FY2023 to FY2023, its largest causes are Philanthropy (55%), Science & Tech (27%), Arts & Culture (17%).
Who are Lightcone Foundation's largest grantees?
By total granted over FY2023 to FY2023: Future of Life Institute ($4.3M), Improve the News Foundation ($3.8M), Beneficial Ai Foundation ($1.8M).
Where is Lightcone Foundation based?
Lightcone Foundation is based in NV.

On method. Every financial figure here is read from IRS e-file XML, the funder’s own 990/990-PF, and from the multi-year returns of the 5 grantees we resolved, each linked to its source. Grantee outcomes are each organization’s own program-service reporting (Form 990, Part III), read as association with funding, never as caused by it. Low-confidence name matches are suppressed rather than guessed. How we build these →

How this is measured
Each figure carries one of six labels. Filed is what the funder reported on its return. Official is another government record about an organization, such as a federal award or a charity register, joined by name where no shared identifier exists. Resolved is an identity we worked out where the filing named a recipient without an EIN, kept only above a measured confidence threshold. Computed is arithmetic over those, like themes, portfolio clusters and co-funder strength. Context is a statistic about a place rather than about an organization, which is what the need overlay is: it describes the area a grantee’s address sits in, not where its work lands. Inferred is drawn by a model from text, like the partnerships read out of public news and organization websites. Each is labeled where it appears.

Generated from the IRS Form 990 e-file return for fiscal year 2023, released 2023. Filings run roughly 12 to 24 months behind; figures are dated accordingly.

Possibly out of date. A more recent filing (FY2024) is on record and reports $34M of grant expense, but none of it to a named recipient. On a Form 990 that can mean grants abroad, filed by region only (Schedule F), grants under $5,000, which are not itemized, or a schedule referenced as an attachment the e-file does not carry. The figures above are therefore from FY2023, the most recent year this funder named its grantees.

Source object · view filing

Play a game based on Lightcone’s filings →

More from the funding graph

The unnamed billions
grants reported with no recipient in the public record
The regranting layer
51% of grant dollars land in the regranting layer
The DAF merry-go-round
$9.7B circulates between donor-advised funds
The endowment market
who holds foundation money, and what just moved
The camps
funders cluster by geography, not ideology
By state
where grant money is based, and what stays home