What this is
US nonprofit and foundation intelligence from a resolved funding graph
Plinth is a US nonprofit and foundation intelligence database built from public IRS Form 990 and 990-PF filings. It turns those filings into a browsable database of US nonprofits, foundations and the grants connecting them: research who funds any nonprofit, explore every foundation’s grantees, identify co-funders and similar portfolios, analyze board relationships, and access grants data through an API.
Unlike a simple 990 search tool, Plinth resolves filings into a multi-year network and adds analysis of funding concentration, repeat relationships, funder affinity, prospective funders and foundation strategy. About 211,000 grantmakers and 20.1 million grants, FY2017–2026 (FY2017–2023 complete analysis window, with FY2024–2026 currently loading as partial data), every filing-derived figure linked to the filing it came from.
In one screen
- Plinth is a US nonprofit and foundation intelligence database built from public IRS Form 990 and 990-PF filings.
- It covers about 211,000 US grantmakers (every US filer that itemized a grant) and 20.1 million individual grants across FY2017–2026. FY2017–2023 complete analysis window, with FY2024–2026 currently loading as partial data.
- Every funder has a page showing where its money goes; every funded nonprofit has a page showing who funds it.
- The filings are resolved into a multi-year network, so co-funders, repeat relationships, funding concentration and similar portfolios are computed rather than looked up.
- Board and governance relationships between organizations are read from the same filings, which is what makes board interlocks visible.
- Grants data is available through a public JSON API, free with a key, and through a plain-English query interface.
- Federal (USAspending) and state government funding to the same nonprofits is layered in alongside philanthropic grants.
What you can do with it
Each capability below runs on the same resolved graph, and each link goes to a page where it is live.
Who funds a nonprofit
The funders whose own filings report grants to a given organization, with amounts and years, read from the funder's side of the relationship, so it does not depend on the nonprofit disclosing anything.
Every foundation's grantees
A full dossier per funder: where the money went, the causes and places it reached, grant sizes, and which relationships renewed.
Similar portfolios
Foundations whose giving resembles a given funder's, computed from what they actually fund rather than from how they classify themselves.
Funding concentration
What share of grant dollars lands on the largest nonprofits, and how few funders the smallest organizations rely on.
The regranting layer
Grant dollars landing on organizations that both receive grants and make them, and how much of that they regrant.
Grants data by state and cause
National, state and cause-level cuts of the same graph: what each state gives, what stays home, and who funds each cause.
The grants API
A JSON API over the whole corpus, free with a key: funders, recipients, individual grant rows, and traversal in both directions.
Where the data comes from
Everything here is read from primary US government records: the IRS Form 990, 990-EZ and 990-PF e-file XML, the IRS Business Master File for organization identity, USAspending.gov for federal awards, and individual state transparency portals for state grants. Nothing is licensed from a third-party directory and nothing is hand-entered. Filings lag roughly 12 to 24 months, so every filing-derived figure is dated to its fiscal year rather than to today.
What Plinth adds on top is the resolution and linking: matching each named recipient to an EIN, connecting the same organization across years and filers, and computing the co-funder, board-interlock and portfolio-similarity layers that no single filing contains. Low-confidence matches are suppressed rather than guessed. The full account is on the methodology page, linked from the provenance footer on every page.
How to get at it
Browse it free. Funder and nonprofit pages are public and need no account. search any organization, or start from a state or a cause.
Query it in plain English. Ask the data writes and runs its own queries over the corpus and shows you the numbers behind the answer.
Pull it through the API. The grants APIis a JSON API over the whole corpus: funders, recipients, individual grant rows, and traversal in both directions along the funder–grantee graph. Free with a key. It is also available as a Claude connector for use inside an AI assistant.
Who builds this
Plinth is a UK-registered company operating a US data product. This site, data.useplinth.com, is Plinth’s US nonprofit and foundation database; useplinth.com is Plinth’s US product site and plinth.org.uk the UK one. All three are the same organization.
Alongside this public database, Plinth builds funding portfolio intelligence for funders: the same public funding graph joined to live data from a foundation’s own current grantees, reports, updates and records from the grants system it already runs, so the outside view and the inside view of a portfolio sit in one place. That product is described at useplinth.com. The database on this site stands on its own and is free to browse whether or not you use it.
Questions about this database
- What is Plinth?
- Plinth is a US nonprofit and foundation intelligence database built from public IRS Form 990 and 990-PF filings. It covers about 211,000 US grantmakers and 20.1 million grants, resolved into a multi-year funding network: who funds any nonprofit, every foundation's grantees, which funders co-fund the same organizations, which portfolios resemble each other, and how the money moves by state and cause. The same data is available through a public grants API.
- Is Plinth a US or a UK company?
- Both. Plinth is a UK-registered company that operates a US data product. This site, data.useplinth.com, is Plinth's US nonprofit and foundation database, covering US organizations and built entirely from US IRS filings. useplinth.com is Plinth's US product site and plinth.org.uk is the UK one. All three are the same organization.
- How is this different from a Form 990 search tool?
- A 990 search tool returns filings; this returns a network. Every filing is resolved to the organizations it names, then linked across years, so the database answers questions a single filing cannot: which other funders back the same nonprofits, how concentrated a funder's giving is, whether a relationship is a one-off or a renewal, which foundations hold portfolios similar to a given one, and which funders a nonprofit has not yet approached but might. Those are computed over the whole corpus, not read off a page.
- Is there an API for US foundation grants?
- Yes. The Plinth grants API is a public JSON API over the whole corpus, free with a key. It traverses the funder–grantee graph in both directions: every grant a funder made, and every funder behind a recipient. with filters for year, cause, recipient state and grant size, and it returns the filing each figure came from.
- Which US nonprofits and foundations are covered?
- Every organization that filed an electronic Form 990, 990-EZ or 990-PF in the period covered. That is the practical definition of the US grantmaking universe, but it is not literally every nonprofit: organizations that file on paper, file no return, or are too small to file will be absent or thinly covered.
- Is the data free?
- Browsing funder and nonprofit pages is free with no account. The API is free with a key at 50 calls a day, and paid above that. The underlying IRS filings are public government records; what is licensed here is the resolution, linking and analysis built on top of them.
- How current is the data?
- The IRS releases e-file data on a lag of roughly 12 to 24 months, so every filing-derived figure is dated to the fiscal year it was filed for rather than to today. Coverage runs across FY2017–2026 and refreshes monthly as the IRS publishes: FY2017–2023 complete analysis window, with FY2024–2026 currently loading as partial data.
More from the funding graph
Figures are read from public IRS filings covering FY2017–2023and lag roughly 12–24 months. Funding relationships are reported as association, never as causation. How we know this. For the measured version, how much of the graph filers supplied, how much we resolved ourselves, and the precision of that matching against held-out filer-supplied EINs, see data quality. How that matching works is on matching; how the charitable-status screen works is on compliance.