· Public charity
Seti Institute
To explore, understand and explain the origin and nature of life in the universe and the evolution of intelligence.
What you funded, over time
Every grant placed by its stated purpose and the recipient’s mission, by year — across FY2017–2025.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
The 29 grants below total $2,034,080 — the rows itemised in this filing. The $2,716,545 headline is the total grant expense reported on the return, so the remaining $682,465 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 · FY2025
- Under $10k5 grants · $41k
- $10k–50k10 grants · $256k
- $50k–250k14 grants · $1.7M
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| BAJA TECHNOLOGY LLC | $196,500 |
| PLANETARY SCIENCE INSTITUTE | $187,842 |
| WEST ED | $175,432 |
| SOUTHWEST RESEARCH INSTITUTE (SWRI) | $172,064 |
| SAN DIEGO STATE UNIVERSITY FOUNDATION | $159,176 |
| CHABOT SPACE & SCIENCE CENTER FOUNDATION | $149,135 |
| PURDUE UNIVERSITY | $132,676 |
| CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES | $111,303 |
| UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA BOARD OF TRUSTEES | $97,360 |
| THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT RIVERSIDE | $86,445 |
| OTHER ORB LLC | $84,000 |
| UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS - AMHERST | $78,243 |
| BAY AREA ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH INSTITUTE | $57,223 |
| CORNELL UNIVERSITY | $50,000 |
| LEIDEN MEASUREMENT TECHNOLOGY | $38,012 |
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 (FY17–25) land where the poverty rate runs at 14%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 81% 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
Grants abroad, by region — $583k on the FY2025 return
Schedule F, as filed: 4 regions, $563k to organizations and $21k to individuals. The IRS asks for region and purpose, not the recipient, so no country or grantee can be named here.
Stated purpose: CLOSING THE NETTECHNOSIGNATURES IN THE LAST FRONTIERS OF RADIO ASTRONOMY · ADVANCE PAYMENT FOR LOGISITIC SUPPORT OF THE TAWANI EXPEDITION
Stated purpose: RADIO STARS WITH THE AILEN TELESCOPE ARRAY · NCCN WEBSITE ENHANCEMENTS · FUNDS TO SUPPORT THE BOOK RESEARCH PROJECT A SIGN IN SPACE
Stated purpose: ALGORITHMS FOR EXPLORING THE RADIO SKY WITH INTERFEROMETERS
Stated purpose: MACHINE LEARNING TO UNCOVER MEGASTRUCTURES IN TRANSIT LIGHT CURVES
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 +18% since the first grant, against +8% for the ones you funded once.
56 repeat relationships — 24 still active in FY2025, 32 since wound down; 5 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, 84% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $319k 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
- GSGIRL SCOUTS OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA6× · 2017–2022 · $2.9M · revenue +3%
- TUTHE UC DAVIS FOUNDATION3× · 2017–2020 · $633k · revenue +66%
- PSPlanetary Science Institute8× · 2018–2025 · $563k · revenue +36%
Funded once
- SPS&B PRECISION MACHINES CONSULTING LLCone grant, 2024 · $78k
- OCOAK CREST INSTITUTE OF SCIENCEone grant, 2023 · $67k · revenue -17%
- SSSTELLAR SOLUTIONS INCone grant, 2018 · $60k
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 mission of mit is to advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the 21st century.
Undergraduate, graduate, and professional education and research across a broad array of academic domains.
The mission of the george washington university (gw) is to educate individuals in liberal arts, languages, sciences, learned professions, and other courses and subjects of study, and to conduct scholarly research and publish the findings…
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…
Research, education and general - princeton university is a private not-for-profit, non-sectarian institution of higher learning with approximately 5,700 undergraduate and 3,300 graduate students. 2,500 students graduated in the 2024-2025…
Education and Research
The university's goal in the coming decade is to advance learning through the integration of teaching, research and service to others. the core of this goal is to prepare graduates to engage with the world and lead lives of meaning. to do…
University of the sciences prepares students to become leaders, innovators, and skilled practitioners in the sciences, the health professions, and related disciplines. we deliver excellence in teaching, research, and service through a safe…
The scripps research institute ("tsri") performs high impact basic biomedical research, improves the human condition by fostering translation of its discoveries into useful products and engages in the highest quality graduate scientific…
The University of New Haven is a student-centered comprehensive university with an emphasis on excellence in liberal arts and professional education. Our mission is to prepare our students to lead purposeful and fulfilling lives in a…
Wpi transforms lives, turns knowledge into action to confront global challenges, and revolutionizes stem through distinctive and inclusive education, projects and research. (http://www.wpi.edu/about/mission.html)
Claremont Graduate University prepares individuals to be leaders for positive change in the world. Unique in its transdisciplinary approach, the University is dedicated to the creation, dissemination, and application of new knowledge and…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Georgetown University and the most unlike its peers is Aries Scientific Inc. Resemblance is measured on each organization’s own IRS 990 mission text; it reflects how work is described, not its quality or impact.
Your grantees are a median of 65 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) — 3% of your grantees by number, and just 2% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 3% 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.
32 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. 32 of the 77 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 GIRL SCOUTS OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA ↗
- Who funds GIRL SCOUTS OF NORTHERN CALIFORNIA ↗
- Who funds THE UC DAVIS FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY OF THE PACIFIC ↗
- Who funds Planetary Science Institute ↗
- Who funds SAN DIEGO STATE UNIVERSITY FOUNDATION SDSU RESEARCH FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds ARIES SCIENTIFIC INC ↗
- Who funds ASSOCIATION OF UNIVERSITIES FOR RESEARCH IN ASTRONOMY INC ↗
- Who funds Southwest Research Institute ↗
- Who funds Carnegie Mellon University ↗
- Who funds SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION ↗
- Who funds GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds Cornell University ↗
- Who funds CHABOT SPACE & SCIENCE CENTER FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds GEORGIA TECH RESEARCH CORPORATION ↗
- Who funds Universities Space Research Association ↗
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: Johns Hopkins University · Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy Inc · West Virginia University Research Corporation · Trustees of Boston University · The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York · University of Delaware · American Chemical Society · Carnegie Mellon University · Cornell University · National Collegiate Athletic Association · Gordon E and Betty I Moore Foundation · Mathematical Association of America 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 Seti Institute 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.
- Trustees of Boston University — 12% of income from government
- Williams College — 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.