· Private foundation
The Kavli Foundation
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
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.
By grant size · FY2024
- Under $10k7 grants · $28k
- $10k–50k25 grants · $537k
- $50k–250k54 grants · $5.3M
- $250k+21 grants · $12M
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| KAVLI INSTITUTE FOR PARTICLE ASTROPHYSICS AND COSMOLOGY AT STANFORD UNIVERS | $2,000,000 |
| KAVLI INSTITUTE FOR BRAIN AND MIND AT UCSD | $1,000,000 |
| KAVLI INSTITUTE FOR NANOSCIENCE AT DELFT UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY | $853,800 |
| KAVLI NEURAL SYSTEMS INSTITUTE (ROCKEFELLER UNIVERSITY) | $833,333 |
| WILLIAM MARSH RICE UNIVERSITY | $632,500 |
| NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES | $600,000 |
| BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY | $550,000 |
| KAVLI INSTITUTE FOR ASTROPHYSICS AND SPACE RESEARCH AT MIT | $500,000 |
| KAVLI INSTITUTE FOR BRAIN SCIENCE AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY | $500,000 |
| KAVLI INSTITUTE FOR SYSTEMS NEUROSCIENCE AT THE NORWEGIAN UNIVERSITY | $500,000 |
| KAVLI INSTITUTE FOR ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS AT PEKING UNIVERSITY | $479,000 |
| UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON FOUNDATION | $450,000 |
| WILLIAM MARSH RICE UNIVERSITY | $426,863 |
| KAVLI INSTITUTE FOR THE PHYSICS AND MATHEMATICS OF THE UNIVERSE AT THE UNIV | $375,000 |
| UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN | $347,440 |
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 — 76% of grant dollars ($160M). The need read here covers only this US portion; the 24% that went abroad ($51M) is mapped below.
Dollar for dollar, your grants (FY17–24) land where the poverty rate runs at 14%, against an area that typically sits at 10%. 90% 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
Beyond the US — 24% of all-years giving ($51M)
23 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 990filings; 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 7% of The Kavli 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.
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 +46% since the first grant, against +43% for the ones you funded once.
140 repeat relationships — 45 still active in FY2024, 95 since wound down; 25 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, 81% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $3.0M 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
NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES8× · 2017–2024 · $17M · revenue +15%
JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY7× · 2017–2024 · $13M · revenue +64%
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SAN FRANCISCO FOUNDATION3× · 2019–2022 · $8.0M · revenue +51%
Funded once
- TCTHE CHANCELLORS MASTERS AND SCHOLARS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORDone grant, 2022 · $6.2M
- TBTHE BOARD OF TRUSTESS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGOone grant, 2022 · $5.0M
- YUYALE UNIVERSITYone grant, 2020 · $1.0M
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.
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…
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…
Provide an independent forum for those who dare to read, think, speak, and write to advance the professional, literary, and scientific understanding of sea power and other issues critical to global security.
Provide clinical instruction to and supervision of medical school students, interns and residents and, incident thereto, rendering professional services.
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 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…
See schedule ouniversity corporation for atmospheric research (ucar), on behalf of, and in cooperation with its member university members, is engaged in the management of long-term atmospheric and related research and educational…
Founded in 1900, aau is composed of 71 distinguished institutions in the united states and canada that continually advance society through education, research, and discovery. our u.s. member universities earn the majority of competitively…
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…
Provide clinical instruction to and supervision of medical school students, interns and residents and, incident thereto, rendering professional services.
Provide clinical instruction to and supervision of medical school students, interns and residents and, incident thereto, rendering professional services.
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…
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Uc Santa Barbara Foundation and the most unlike its peers is Sculpted Light in the Brain Association. 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 58 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) — 0% of your grantees by number, and just 0% of your money.
The orgs you fund almost never close — 0.0% 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.
97 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. 97 of the 267 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 NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES ↗
- Who funds JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SAN FRANCISCO FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds THE ROCKEFELLER UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY ↗
- Who funds UC SAN DIEGO FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds Cornell University ↗
- Who funds The Salk Institute for Biological Studies ↗
- Who funds UC SANTA BARBARA FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BERKELEY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds University of Chicago ↗
- Who funds THE TRUSTEES OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK ↗
- Who funds Massachusetts Institute of Technology ↗
- Who funds William Marsh Rice University ↗
- Who funds AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE ↗
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: Gordon E and Betty I Moore Foundation · The Simons Foundation Inc · Rita Allen Foundation Inc · Alfred P Sloan Foundation · Silicon Valley Community Foundation · The Heising-Simons Foundation · Johns Hopkins University · The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York · The David and Lucile Packard Foundation · Research Corporation dba Research Corporation for Science Advancement · The Brinson Foundation · Gates 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 Kavli 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
- Compass Science Communication Inc — 29% of income from government
- Marine Biological Laboratory — 20% of income from government
- The Broad Institute Inc — 19% of income from government
- Trustees of Tufts College — 13% of income from government
- Trustees of Boston University — 12% of income from government
- Johns Hopkins University — 12% of income from government
- Brandeis University — 9% 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
- The American Society for Cell Biology — 4% of income from government
- American Physical Society — 1% of income from government
- Addgene Inc — 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.