What philanthropy can do that governments and markets can’t
and why you should care
The past ~3 years have been a particularly difficult time to raise venture capital funding for science. During this recession, many scientists and startups turned to government agencies like SBIR, STTR, and CIRM for non-dilutive funding to stay afloat.
But now with government agencies also in a state of flux under the new administration, an emerging category of science funding has become especially relevant.
Science philanthropy (aka venture philanthropy) is the strategic allocation of private capital to support ambitious, high-risk scientific research outside of traditional venture return timescales. It’s a rapidly growing funding category that has shown its unique potential for science impact over the past few years. Breaking away from traditional government or VC interests and timescales, philanthropic initiatives like Impetus Grants deployed $34M to fund dozens of basic research questions in aging biology that may otherwise not be funded by the NIH or VC. Organizations like Convergent Research has enabled the creation of +7 Focused Research Organizations (FRO) that tackle early-stage, big problems from connectomics to ocean-based carbon removal at ~$50M each. And places like Arc Institute removes the pressure of grant writing by giving professors no-strings-attached, multi-year funding to devote themselves to just science (courtesy of a ~$650M endowment from Patrick Collison and others).
As Milken Institute and SSIR have noted, philanthropic funding cannot completely replace VC, and certainly not government, funding. But it can still create an alternative avenue of scientific innovation and economic progress that traditional financial and operational models may not touch. In today’s economic climate, philanthropy’s greatest risk isn’t that a project fails—it’s that it doesn’t get funded at all.
Here, I’ll explore what philanthropy can achieve in science today, its future directions, and how it can transform research.
Philanthropy can fund individual labs and scientists before proof-of-concepts
Today’s government grant system has become a sort of treadmill—PIs must produce just enough preliminary data to win their next round of funding, then use that funding to finish the project they’ve already nearly completed. This endless cycle eats up nearly half of a researcher’s time in proposal writing and review, stifling big-picture thinking and trapping labs in incremental, safe bets. Now with over a billion dollars in funding cuts, many scientists are forced to downsize, re-scope, and even change their research topics. While unfortunate, this also gives many PIs the opportunity to step off the treadmill to redirect towards ambitious high-risk research they’ve been itching to pursue.
Impetus Grants was a concrete example of how science philanthropy’s long-term, risk-tolerant model can fill in existing funding gaps in academic research. During the COVID era when many non-pandemic related funding sources were cut off, Impetus funded high-risk geroscience that saved labs and seeded new projects that would’ve never gone off the ground. Many of the funded projects were later published, picked up by other funding sources, and even changed the trajectory of research labs entirely.
Impetus stood out by pairing the rapid turnaround and talent-first approach of microgrants like Emergent Ventures and 1517 with award sizes that sometimes rivaled government grants. Although its core features—speed, high-risk tolerance, and talent-based selection—have inspired similar initiatives, few have truly replicated its scale and impact. Fundraising tens of millions up front is logistically difficult too. Most philanthropists lack the bandwidth or wealth to commit that kind of capital, coordinating follow-on rounds across multiple donors is cumbersome, and sustaining commitments over time is far from guaranteed.
Although mission-driven foundations like the Michael J. Fox Foundation and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative actively seed high-risk, investigator-led projects, the vast majority of philanthropic dollars still flow through institutions or toward later-stage, de-risked work. In 2021, of the $24.7 billion that philanthropy contributed to U.S. basic research, only about $10.2 billion went to investigator-initiated grants—meaning most gifts underwrite endowments, large program awards, or infrastructure rather than small “seed” awards for new projects and PIs.
To change that, philanthropists need a new model: one that bundles and syndicates small, risk-tolerant grants at scale under specific theses—similar to SBIR or CIRM for academia. By creating large (pooled) funds dedicated explicitly to lab start-ups and early PIs, philanthropy can unlock breakthrough science on a timeline and at a scale that neither public nor venture funding can match.
2. Philanthropy can enable “big if true”, impactful projects outside of traditional government or venture capital timescales.
Over the past few decades, we’ve seen governments underwrite massive, multi-billion-dollar science efforts—the Human Genome Project, the Large Hadron Collider, ITER fusion, and others—that delivered essential tools and platforms for entire fields. But as our scientific reach expanded, some problems began falling through the cracks between NIH R01s and VC.
Some of these problems get tackled by academic consortiums like SCGE, Human Cell Atlas or Bat1k, where labs take months to years collecting funds and executing their vision. Those projects are invaluable, but they’re often slow to stand up, require complex institutional coordination, and only cover a handful of disease areas or technologies.
Convergent Research remains the only organization that has consistently created Focused Research Organizations (FROs), a “strike team” for science that tackles these niche problems in time-bound (5-7yrs), medium-scale (~$50M) projects that create public research tools. Funded by philanthropic dollars, FROs are one of the most recent examples of how strategic philanthropically funded research programs can deliver outsized impact. Organizations in their portfolio are examples of “big if true” projects where philanthropy is in an exceptional position to fund. But Convergent is just one organization. To scale this approach widely, we need three core components:
Problem identification at scale. We must continuously scan the research landscape for the highest-leverage, neglected problems—whether a hard-to-model disease, a missing bioengineering platform, or an intractable data-infrastructure gap.
Field-building around solutions. Once “big if true” questions are identified, we must convene experts and nurture small, cross-disciplinary teams equipped to attack it—often drawing talent from academia, startups, and industry alike.
Mission-aligned funding. Finally, we must consistently identify and aggregate capital from philanthropists who are interested and able to fund these projects. Pooled vehicles or multi-donor collaboratives can reduce individual exposure and streamline due diligence, so that mission-driven funders can back bold ideas without committing tens of millions on their own.
Though Science Philanthropy Alliance and Renaissance Philanthropy have made significant headway, a vast gap remains to fully unlock philanthropy’s potential to drive scientific breakthroughs. More organizations must bring together founders and funders so that they can launch high-impact science projects at a pace that’s no longer rate-limited by access to one another.
Currently, maybe predictably, one of the greatest bottleneck remains the number of visible funders that are interested and able to fund ambitious philanthropic science projects at the scale of $20-50M. Funders give out of personal interest to topics that affect(ed) them (i.e. climate, education reform, history of cancer, etc.) while projects outside of that thesis are rarely of interest. This means there are very few “generalists” in philanthropy as you see in VC, making it increasingly difficult to fund niche projects outside of the zeitgeist.
By breaking down these silos and building a broader base of generalist funders, we can set the stage for science philanthropy to scale—to write large checks on flexible timelines and with minimal compromise.
3. Science philanthropy can scale to write large checks while avoiding red tape and commercial pressures.
Science philanthropy at-scale, though not entirely new conceptually, is still in its early stages as a true ecosystem. Unlike startups with established “playbooks” from accelerators, VC fellowships, to multi-series fundraising rounds → IPO, we haven’t yet fully systematized philanthropic science innovation. This immaturity causes growing pains like:
Great funders are hard to find and reach. Match-making groups such as Convergent Research meet far more founders than do philanthropists with a thesis fit. Ultra high net worth individuals (UHWNI), like LPs, are also very difficult to reach. Open directories of active high-net-worth science philanthropists like ProPublica’s nonprofit explorer are necessary for scientists to self-qualify and approach the right donor.
Great founders are hard to spot and nurture. Scientists outside the handful of deep-pocketed hubs (San Francisco, Cambridge MA, etc.) rarely know where—or to whom—to pitch. Creating robust ecosystems and “matchmakers” that coach scientists and pre-screen proposals for donors are critical.
Great communities are sparse. The infrastructure that turns one-off gifts into repeatable pipelines (expert evaluators, project operators, peer networks) is still being built. Codifying best practices through pitch decks, reach-out checklists, playbooks are necessary, so newcomers are well-informed and not duplicating effort.
The path forward therefore lies in strengthening the ecosystem as a whole. First, we need more visible “deal flow” platforms—centralized databases where philanthropists can browse vetted science pitches and founders can showcase their boldest ideas. Second, philanthropist–scientist matchmaking must evolve from one-off introductions to scalable, tech-enabled networks that recommend ideal pairings based on shared passions and impact metrics. Finally, building communities through regular meetups, journal groups, and “accelerators”—will turn N=1 success-cases into repeatable playbooks. Only by tackling funder discovery, founder support, and community infrastructure simultaneously can we systematize the creation of these projects.
4. Emerging tailwinds in science philanthropy
Fortunately, both micro- and macro-level forces are converging to make these initiatives easier:
Currently: Renaissance Philanthropy, in partnership with ARIA, UK’s new (D)ARPA, is actively plugging these gaps by building out communities and launching financed programs that can incubate scientists with bold ideas. ARIA also seeds new projects within their Opportunity Spaces up to £500k, which will gradually build a case to justify funding early-stage individuals and labs with ambitious ideas.
Next 1-5yrs: A growing burden of proof will form from the expansion of philanthropic initiatives like fast grants, FROs, Wellcome Leap, and others. These initiatives over the next <5yrs will show the world that small teams with philanthropic runway can enable breakthrough science at a fraction of government timelines. Most notably, the first FRO “exit” should be observed closely, as it becomes the first case study of how FROs can generate non-traditional, non-linear returns. Since the oldest FRO, e11Bio, is still ~3yrs old, it will be another 2-4yrs until we see an exit since their average lifespan is around 5-7 years.
Next 5-10yrs: A cultural shift toward philanthropy & “impact investing”: Philanthropy itself is becoming increasingly popular, with nonprofit support for basic research increasing from 20% to nearly 40% over the last seven decades. The number of multi-donor collaboratives (Figure 1., Bridgespan Group) are also growing every year, many of which are focused on science and social impact. This trend will likely continue to expand and attract more new UHWNIs, philanthropists, and technologists into science philanthropy.
Next 10-20yrs: Over the next ~two decades, roughly $84 trillion is poised to transfer to Gen X and Millennials, minting thousands of first-time major donors—many of them women—who are expected to channel unprecedented sums into new categories of science. Capturing this opportunity is a growing focus for banks, and should be a focus for emerging collaboratives and nonprofit organizations.
Philanthropy has the innate potential to quickly de-risk, develop, and commercialize bold ideas without the logistical or financial limitations of public universities or venture incubators/funds. If executed correctly, we can realize scientific innovation at a scale that could transform this century. The next “Bell Labs” of the 21st century may arise from philanthropy instead of public or venture funding.