Meeting the moment: how scientific philanthropies are expanding their reach

Pranay Shah (presenter on left) of the UK Advanced Research and Invention Agency gives a talk alongside Jean-Paul Chretien (right), programme director of Renaissance Philanthropy’s Big if True Science Accelerator.Credit: Renaissance PhilanthropyAt the start of 2025, federal funding cuts rippled through the US research ecosystem. At the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in Princeton, New Jersey, chief science officer Alonzo Plough watched as scientists turned in droves to the foundation and other philanthropic funders. According to Plough, “it felt like I was back in my old public-health director role of emergency response”: the foundation was racing to provide stop-gap funding for databases and research projects.According to data from the US National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, roughly US$937 billion was spent on US research and development in 2023. The Science Philanthropy Alliance, a non-partisan coalition of funders working to increase private research funding, estimates that philanthropic funding contributed $27 billion to university and non-profit research organizations in 2024, about 21% of the total funding of these institutions. Of that, $18.3 billion came from non-profit sources, whereas $8.8 billion was paid through legacy philanthropy in the form of annual endowment payouts. By contrast, the federal government spent $63.6 billion on research at academic institutions in 2024.Nature Spotlight: Philanthropy and awardsWhen the Science Philanthropy Alliance launched in New York City in 2014, it had six members. The number has now grown to 45, including 7 that joined last year. It’s one of many philanthropy collectives internationally that mentor and connect private funders with research opportunities — but it formed to increase private support for basic research. “One of the purposes of our organization is to bring people together to discuss what is urgent and important — and form strategic interest groups around some of those areas,” says president France Córdova.Philanthropic funders are changing to match the times. “Federal funding cuts in science have made our work even more critical, and we’re doubling down to meet new needs,” says Wendy Schmidt, president and co-founder of the Schmidt Family Foundation in Palo Alto, California. “We’re not replacing government funding or government agencies. We are taking the risk that comes with innovation,” she says, noting that philanthropic organizations have more freedom to fund risky projects than do governments, which are spending taxpayers’ money. To that end, private funders are exploring creative models to identify and support overlooked research. These include venture philanthropy — a multi-year, strategic, hands-on approach to achieve social impact — as well as joint funding calls between various non-profit organizations, and sometimes with government agencies, to pursue complicated research on global issues such as climate, health and artificial intelligence. Another goal is for these endeavours to bolster transparency and trust in the scientific process. For most philanthropies, the aim is to identify projects in which funding can lead to breakthroughs — often by supporting blue-sky or interdisciplinary research, which many researchers think is getting harder to secure funding for. “The greatest discoveries come where there are porous boundaries between disciplines,” says Naomi Azrieli, a Science Philanthropy Alliance member and chair of the Toronto-based Azrieli Foundation — the largest non-corporate philanthropic organization in Canada.Shoring up supportLast year, the administration of US President Donald Trump terminated more than 2,200 active research grants, totalling $2.5 billion in already-allocated funding, according to a March study1. Within that, almost $400 million in funding for students and early-career researchers was cut. A survey of Science Philanthropy Alliance members found that around a dozen changed or considered shifting their grant making in response to federal cuts. Several established flexible mechanisms to help protect current and past grant recipients, including extensions and gap funding to keep a project alive. Others bolstered funding streams for early-career researchers. In February, in response to Trump administration funding cuts, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, a philanthropic organization in Palo Alto, California, made a one-time investment to fund more postdocs at institutions at which it had provided historical support. Foundation president Aileen Lee says that the organization deployed $55 million to 30 universities “to give flexibility to deal with near-term uncertainty”, given the vulnerability associated with this career stage. The current estimate is that it will fund about 400 postdocs across 25 fields.France Córdova is the president of the Science Philanthropy Alliance.Credit: Science Philanthropy AlliancePhilanthropic organizations have a leadership role that can help to shape the dynamic research enterprise, says Lee. Similarly to many philanthropies, she adds, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation uses a “make a difference filter” to identify overlooked areas of science that it thinks will be impactful if funded. For example, to speed up innovation, the foundation seeks out advances in tools, technologies, data sets or conceptual frameworks that have opened up promising avenues of enquiry. Last year, for example, the foundation invested $230 million in quantum-materials research that promises to yield a new generation of low-powered sensors and electronic devices. Most philanthropies, including the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, spend roughly 5% of their endowment annually, which is required by US tax law for non-profit organizations, with the interest on the remaining pot of money used to fund their efforts in perpetuity. Last year, however, several organizations increased their spending in the wake of US funding disruptions. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation was one of several to increase its charitable payout from the standard 5% of the endowment to 6%. And it encouraged other foundations to adopt a “set it at six” approach, an idea that is gaining traction. A 2025 National Center for Family Philanthropy report found that 58% of family foundations spent between 5.1% and 10% of their original endowment annually in 2025, a large increase from 40% of foundations in 2015. Why China’s philanthropists are digging deep for researchThe Gates Foundation has maintained an annual payout rate of more than 5% since it was created in 2000. Last year, however, it announced that it would spend an estimated $200 billion, or the remainder of the endowment over the next 20 years, before closing its operations in 2045. The move is in line with the Giving Pledge, a voluntary commitment among billionaires to give away the majority of their wealth, which Bill Gates, Melinda French Gates and Warren Buffet launched in 2010. Since then, more than 250 similarly wealthy individuals from 30 countries have taken the pledge.Interest in the Giving Pledge has waned in recent years, however, because of what The New York Times has called a “billionaire backlash”, led by a new cohort of capitalists who are dismissive of philanthropy. In lieu of the Giving Pledge, some billionaires are establishing their own funding streams for a handful of high-risk, high-reward projects — particularly in AI, biomedical research and climate change — that align with their interests.Venture philanthropyOne of the biggest trends in the past 15 years is the growth of venture philanthropy, which funds short-term endeavours to tackle pivotal scientific goals. In 2021, Eric Schmidt, the former chief executive of Google, and his wife Wendy Schmidt gave tens of millions of dollars to the non-profit organization Convergent Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This made them key contributors to Convergent Research’s focused research organizations (FROs). Similar to start-up businesses, FROs are intent on solving scientific challenges that are not likely to be tackled by academia — for example, because the findings have a low likelihood of being published and do not yet have the commercial viability to be attractive to private industry. The FROs are not a replacement for basic research; rather they focus on producing publicly available technology, data sets or the tools necessary to foster a new era of discovery. Examples include [C]Worthy, an FRO in Boulder, Colorado, aiming to develop ocean-based carbon dioxide removal technologies, and EvE Bio in Durham, North Carolina, which plans to catalogue the drug–target interactions for almost 1,400 drugs that have been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration. Interest in FROs has also spread across the Atlantic Ocean. Last year, Convergent Research announced a partnership with the UK Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) to develop promising FRO proposals. Two such organizations were launched in March — one to develop AI models to democratize access to environmental data, and another to build platforms to track synapses to improve understanding of brain connectivity.Renaissance Philanthropy’s Tom Kalil (left) speaks to Jessica Cole, one of the organization’s fellows. Credit: Showreal for Renaissance PhilanthropyOther strategies aim to harness individual donations to spur blue-sky research endeavours. Tom Kalil, deputy director of technology and innovation during US president Barack Obama’s administration, launched Renaissance Philanthropy in 2024. Inspired by how wealthy Italian families supported Leonardo da Vinci’s research, the advisory organization’s mission is “to fuel a twenty-first-century renaissance by increasing the ambition of philanthropists, scientists and innovators”, says Kalil. There is “all this intellectual dark matter” — referring to knowledge that exists but has not yet been recorded — that goes unexplored because researchers do not see any paths to getting non-conventional or exploratory research funded, Kalil explains. “There is a willingness of some philanthropists to explore broader and more interesting models.” Renaissance Philanthropy develops time-bound, thesis-driven goals, led by a qualified expert and matched with a donor. Examples of this funding model include efforts to accelerate the development of geological hydrogen — a carbon-free energy source — and an initiative to use AI to speed up mathematical discoveries. It also has a programme called BiTS, which stands for Big if True Science Accelerator, to help scientists turn ambitious research ideas into fundable development projects. Renaissance Philanthropy also has international partnerships in the United Kingdom, Germany and Japan. “Because philanthropy can take risks others cannot, we also have the opportunity to build new models of how science is conducted, championing interdisciplinary science,” says Wendy Schmidt. For example, the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Observatory System, which was announced this year, will consist of three ground-based telescope arrays and one space-based telescope — tools that will be available for scientists globally, she says. Philanthropic organizations are also increasingly focusing their resources on unique areas of interdisciplinary science. One of the newest members of the Scientific Philanthropy Alliance, the NOMIS Foundation in Zurich, Switzerland, identified three focus areas for its future funding endeavours: decoding the principles and organization of life; exploring brain, mind and behaviour; and understanding human coexistence and interaction. “We see it as our responsibility to do and support things that would otherwise simply not exist, thus being a good complement to public funding sources,” says Jörg Heldmann, NOMIS’s chief operating officer and deputy managing director.

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