· Private foundation
The Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fund for Strategic Innovation
Its FY2024 filing reports that it funds preselected organizations and did not take unsolicited requests; check the foundation's own site before ruling it out.
What you funded, over time
By grantee IRS cause code (NTEE).
A cause breakdown isn’t shown here: 54% of THE ERIC AND WENDY SCHMIDT FUND FOR STRATEGIC INNOVATION’s grantee dollars fall outside its nine largest cause areas, whether because the recipient carries no IRS cause code or because its cause sits in the long tail. A chart would be mostly one residual band and misrepresent the portfolio.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
By grant size · FY2024
- Under $10k58 grants · $334k
- $10k–50k68 grants · $1.3M
- $50k–250k108 grants · $11M
- $250k+145 grants · $231M
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| THE RHODES TRUST | $12,500,000 |
| KYUTAI | $10,442,000 |
| BARACK OBAMA FOUNDATION | $10,000,000 |
| FUTURE HOUSE INC | $10,000,000 |
| THE RHODES TRUST | $8,069,204 |
| CONVERGENT RESEARCH INC | $8,000,000 |
| CONVERGENT RESEARCH INC | $8,000,000 |
| THE RHODES TRUST | $7,038,587 |
| DIGITAL HARBOR FOUNDATION INC | $6,094,431 |
| MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY | $6,000,000 |
| THE RHODES TRUST | $5,937,909 |
| CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY | $4,826,269 |
| CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY | $4,500,000 |
| CONVERGENT RESEARCH INC | $4,000,000 |
| THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA | $3,065,404 |
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 US giving — 64% of grant dollars ($451M). The need read here covers only this US portion; the 36% that went abroad ($250M) is mapped below.
Your human-services grants (FY18–24, $4.2M) land where the poverty rate runs at 14%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 100% 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
Beyond the US — 36% of all-years giving ($250M)
26 countries, by the recipient’s country on the filing.
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. International giving is mapped by the recipient’s country from the same 990 filings; comparable need data isn’t available at that grain.
Where the work is directed
The same grants, placed two ways — where each recipient sits, and where its stated purpose earmarks the money.
About 10% of The Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fund for Strategic Innovation’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 +43% since the first grant, against +15% for the ones you funded once.
177 repeat relationships — 99 still active in FY2024, 78 since wound down; 162 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, 77% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $51M 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
- CRCONVERGENT RESEARCH INC3× · 2022–2024 · $67M · revenue +543% · 81% of their budget
- CICALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY3× · 2022–2024 · $26M · revenue +15%
- DHDIGITAL HARBOR FOUNDATION2× · 2023–2024 · $9.6M · revenue +93%
Funded once
- EOEUROPEAN ORGANIZATION FOR NUCLEAR RESEARCHone grant, 2023 · $8.5M
- FBFONDAZIONE BOLOGNA UNIVERSITY BUSINESS SCHOOLone grant, 2022 · $3.0M
- CMCHANCELLOR MASTERS & SCHOLARS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORDone grant, 2023 · $2.7M · revenue +10%
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.
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For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Science and Technology Futures Inc and the most unlike its peers is Recidiviz Inc. 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 27% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.3% 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.
289 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. 289 of the 615 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 CONVERGENT RESEARCH INC ↗
- Who funds CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY ↗
- Who funds Massachusetts Institute of Technology ↗
- Who funds FUTURE HOUSE INC ↗
- Who funds THE BARACK OBAMA FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds DIGITAL HARBOR FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds CAMBRIDGE IN AMERICA ↗
- Who funds THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds University of Chicago ↗
- Who funds New York University ↗
- Who funds INSTITUTE OF INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION INC ↗
- Who funds ROCKEFELLER PHILANTHROPY ADVISORS INC ↗
- Who funds UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY FOUNDATION FOR A NEW AMERICAN UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds President and Fellows of Harvard College ↗
- Who funds SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY FUTURES INC ↗
- Who funds JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds NEW VENTURE FUND ↗
- Who funds Carnegie Mellon University ↗
- Who funds The Trustees of Princeton University ↗
- Who funds OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds GANNA WALSKA LOTUSLAND ↗
- Who funds SWANITI INITIATIVE ↗
- Who funds MONTEREY BAY AQUARIUM FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds Cornell University ↗
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: Gates Foundation · The William & Flora Hewlett Foundation · Silicon Valley Community Foundation · Carnegie Corporation of New York · New Venture Fund · The Ford Foundation · The Rockefeller Foundation · Alfred P Sloan Foundation · The Schmidt Family Foundation · Impactassetsinc · Tides Foundation · John D and Catherine T Macarthur 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 The Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fund for Strategic Innovation 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.
- Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution — 63% of income from government
- Center On Rural Innovation Inc — 37% of income from government
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology — 35% of income from government
- Vehicles for Change Inc — 16% of income from government
- Baltimore Corps Inc — 15% of income from government
- Trustees of Boston University — 12% of income from government
- Johns Hopkins University — 12% of income from government
- Social Finance Inc — 12% of income from government
- The Trustees of Princeton University — 11% of income from government
- Jobs for the Future Inc — 11% of income from government
- Worcester Polytechnic Institute — 8% of income from government
- Citizen Schools Inc — 8% of income from government
- Institute for Advanced Study - Louis Bamberger & Mrs Felix Fuld Foundation — 7% of income from government
- President and Fellows of Harvard College — 7% of income from government
- Northeastern University — 7% of income from government
- Digital Harbor Foundation — 2% of income from government
- Igem Foundation Inc — 1% 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.