Funds

The Advanced Research for Climate Emergencies (ARC) initiative is a philanthropic fund focused on combating catastrophic climate risks through translational R&D. It backs expert-led programs to research new options to predict, prevent, and mitigate tipping point risks like ice sheet collapse, Arctic destabilization, and runaway methane emissions. ARC proactively bridges critical gaps left by government inaction, ensuring that humanity has well-understood, viable options ready to address climate emergencies when they inevitably arise.

The AI for Education program, with support from the Walton Family Foundation, seeks to surface and bet on breakthrough technical ideas that can drive student success.

The AI for Math Fund, supported by founding donor XTX Markets, seeks to advance the pace and impact of math discovery by supporting projects that are important for the field.

Renaissance Philanthropy, in collaboration with the UK Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), launched a call for proposals to identify novel high-value AI for Science datasets that advance the UK’s AI for Science Strategy. Read about the finalists and their proposals here.

Incubated within the Advanced Research for Climate Emergencies (ARC) program, the Arctic Stabilization Initiative (ASI) advances Arctic-targeted climate interventions to slow or reverse our trajectory toward planetary thresholds. ASI delivers the predictive tools and formal scientific benchmarks necessary to evaluate whether proposed interventions can slow or reverse our trajectory toward planetary thresholds such as tipping points and loss of summer sea ice.

The Chimaera Fund aims to responsibly and rapidly scale geologic hydrogen – the first new primary energy source discovered in 80 years.

Drawing from the playbooks that scaled other subsurface revolutions like shale gas and geothermal energy, we invest in open-access field demonstrations and advise national and subnational governments on effective policy designs to unlock the industry by 2030.

Cosmic Frontier Labs is building a new class of scientific tools to accelerate discovery and exploration of the Universe.

The Mathlib Initiative provides professional resources to support the community-driven development of Mathlib, an open-source library of formal mathematics written in the Lean theorem prover. Rather than replacing volunteer contributions, the Initiative amplifies them through dedicated editorial support, infrastructure development, and ecosystem coordination.

The team works closely with both the Mathlib maintainer team and the Lean Focused Research Organization, bringing strategic focus and professional resources to sustain the extraordinary growth of formal mathematics.

A multi-donor philanthropic fund dedicated to sustaining and evolving the open source software stack that underpins science. Seeded with $20 million in anchor funding from Biohub and Wellcome and support from The Kavli Foundation and the Research Software Alliance, the fund aims to invest in the open computational foundations of science, and the communities behind them, with an initial focus on the life sciences.

The Public Benefit Innovation Fund is a philanthropic venture fund and R&D lab which is supported by Renaissance Philanthropy. PBIF provides seed funding and technical support for researchers, nonprofits, academic labs, startups, and technologists working to improve social service delivery.

The Talent Mobility Fund increases the use of existing but underused immigration pathways through a multi-track expert-led grants program. While legal barriers often limit the ability of talent to move to opportunity, there is a wide range of pathways in the U.S. and globally like the O-1, EU student visa, and Japan’s Specified Skilled Worker visa, which are underutilized relative to their potential.

Tertiary accelerates the pace, scale and deployment of technological innovation by sourcing, structuring and monitoring loan guarantees for sustainable infrastructure projects backed by private philanthropic capital. By putting funds at risk instead of giving it away as grants, Tertiary offers philanthropists a new way to have impact.

The UK Horizons Programme seeks to supercharge the UK’s R&D ecosystem by building networks of innovators, expanding the diversity of science translation mechanisms in the UK, strengthening the UK’s philanthropic ecosystem, and building research translation strategies.