$50M Anonymous Donation Powers Climate Solutions in a Pivotal Moment

We’re thrilled to announce that the Founders Pledge Climate Fund has received an extraordinary $50M anonymous donation—our largest single gift to date- which was covered in Heatmap this week.

This significant support follows an anonymous $40M donation we received last year and underscores a powerful vote of confidence in Founders Pledge's pioneering “Funds-first” model for strategic, high-impact philanthropy. As a Fund operating at $100M+ scale, we’ve not only moved significant philanthropic capital but also shaped the climate field by catalyzing and scaling key organizations.

This generous donation couldn’t be more timely. At a time where climate action is under threat in the US and around the world, our approach meets the moment by identifying and supporting opportunities where philanthropic dollars can catalyze outsized impact.

How our climate fund meets the moment

At Founders Pledge, all of our grant-making is guided by rigorous research. Since 2021, when we first warned about climate philanthropy over-relying on betting on best-case scenarios, our approach has focused on systematic risk reduction. We invest in bets that can protect our planet even if popular strategies fail, reducing the risk of the overall climate effort by supporting overlooked pathways and solutions.

Our “Funds-first” model makes it possible for donors to support bold, catalytic, time-sensitive funding opportunities that are much harder to effectively support as individuals. By pooling donor contributions and deploying them strategically, our Climate Fund has been able to take early action in neglected spaces, step in promptly when major funders leave, and build a globally diversified portfolio of promising climate solutions.

Building the right-of-center climate and clean energy field

A major gap in U.S. climate philanthropy historically has been the massive underfunding of right-of-center climate and clean energy organizations. While single left-of-center groups receive over $300M annually, the Ecoright as a field receives only around $30M—a >10x funding disparity that leaves climate progress vulnerable to political shifts. But successful clean energy policies require bipartisan support.

Building robustness to a variety of election outcomes , in 2024 we deployed $8.7M in 2024 to rapidly build bipartisan climate leadership through our field building partner DEPLOY/US. This network of over 30 organizations with diverse policy priorities—from the American Conservation Coalition to C3 Solutions to the Evangelical Environmental Network—mobilizes conservative constituencies, conducts crucial policy research, and creates space for right-of-center lawmakers to lead on climate action.

These investments became critical for supporting climate action during the transition period after the US election, helping the network prepare to work with the incoming Trump Administration and Republican Congress.

“Founders Pledge acts with the rare combination of speed and strategic clarity. Their agility—paired with a math-driven focus on emissions—has been catalytic for DEPLOY/US and our 30 partner grantees across the Ecoright field. Together, we’ve been able to seize fleeting opportunities while staying firmly grounded in long-term strategy and measurable emissions impact.” —Alex Bozmoski, EVP at DEPLOY/US

While our commitments made us one of the largest funders of the Ecoright field in 2024, this remains a significantly under-resourced field. By investing in the field builder and field building capacity, we are preparing this field to absorb radically more funding, with the hopes of building a future where climate and clean energy priorities can become increasingly depolarized.

Stepping in to fill urgent funding gaps

We identified U.S. clean energy innovation advocacy as a priority starting in 2020 and re-affirmed this in our landscaping analysis in January 2021. Since 2017, Breakthrough Energy has served as a leading player in the energy innovation policy space, building the ecosystem of organizations that support innovation policy across the political spectrum.

When Breakthrough Energy suddenly closed their policy program in March 2025, threatening to leave this work underfunded at the most critical moment, Founders Pledge stepped in. We provided $3.5M to launch the Innovation Initiative, working with former Breakthrough Energy staff to ensure critical infrastructure remains intact to continue driving federal innovation policy. This work helps ensure that the U.S. can continue to be a leader in clean energy innovation, a crucial opportunity for high-leverage climate progress.

“Funding from Founders Pledge enabled us to support and convene a variety of bipartisan policy and civil society organizations to keep clean energy innovation on the national agenda.” —Robin Millican, Innovation Initiative Advisor

With this rapid investment, we also preserved the ability for other funders to invest in this effort, creating a vehicle for philanthropists to support an otherwise threatened and fractured energy innovation advocacy ecosystem.

Funding clean firm power before it was hot

Our early focus on clean firm power—advanced nuclear and next-generation geothermal—included major grants to organizations like Clean Air Task Force, Terra Praxis, and Quantified Carbon. We became a leading player in pushing clean firm power forward long before this garnered the major attention it is receiving now in the wake of rising energy demand.

“Founders Pledge recently helped plug unexpected funding gaps due to shifting philanthropic priorities in the U.S, just as CATF needed to mount an aggressive campaign to defend gains threatened by a new administration. Founders Pledge is an informed, reliable and strategic partner whose support has been a bedrock of our success.” —Armond Cohen, Executive Director of CATF

We’ve also scaled our efforts to promising, neglected geographies. China accounts for nearly 30% of global emissions but receives less than 6% of known foundation funding for climate mitigation—a massive philanthropic blind spot. Our $3M grant launching the China Carbon Neutrality Initiative at Tsinghua University represents a systematic approach to coal repowering—retrofitting plants with clean heat sources rather than shutting them down. This pioneering work was recently recognized as a 2024 representative achievement by the Tsinghua University Education Foundation.

Preparing to scale broader climate coalitions globally

Climate action around the world is becoming increasingly under threat. We need to unlock ways to continue enabling climate progress, even as global priorities shift toward energy affordability and energy security.

Through our new partnership with Pathways, we’re commissioning and participating in the first systematic geographical prioritization study for building broader coalitions that support climate action beyond traditional environmental constituencies. This project will identify early opportunities to broaden country-level coalitions, addressing a bias in climate philanthropy we've documented in the U.S. that likely exists globally. We expect that this work will open significant opportunities for funders by building new capacity in underserved pockets of climate and clean energy philanthropy.

Building tools to optimize a global portfolio of climate investments

Funding and scaling a global portfolio of bets requires the ability to compare varied options across geographies, technologies, and approaches. Only when we have a systematic model of the world of climate impact can we make the best decisions on how to change our portfolio when major events—such as elections, philanthropy trends, and technological breakthroughs—change the opportunity landscape.

This is why we have been heavily investing in comparative methodology to help us compare heterogeneous opportunities in a common model of expected impact. We use these tools both to optimize our portfolio and to understand the priorities for reducing uncertainty for our research.

Guiding the conversation on climate philanthropy

The central problem of climate philanthropy is not a lack of money, but systematic biases in how climate philanthropy is allocated. To help the broader philanthropic ecosystem move toward a more balanced response, we publish in-depth reports about how our thinking around climate strategy evolves in light of the shifting political landscape.

In October 2024, we published “Climate at the Crossroads?” to explain how we adapted to the changing environment in light of the upcoming U.S. presidential election. Most recently, we published “All In” in January 2025, the first systematic mapping of climate philanthropy priorities in a changed world, which was featured in the Wall Street Journal and has helped grantees and major funders re-orient some of their work.

Going exponential with our grantmaking

Climate philanthropy is a race against the clock. Given the urgency of this problem and the trajectory-changing nature of high-impact solutions, we expect the cost-effectiveness of climate funding to depreciate significantly over time.

This analysis has guided our grantmaking strategy since 2020, driving us to invest money entrusted to us as quickly as we can do so without sacrificing the rigor and diligence of our research process. After receiving our first major infusion last year, we formalized this approach into explicit policy and massively increased our giving—we deployed $12.5M in 2024, an increase of 78% compared to 2023. We further increased the rate of our giving in the first half of 2025 and will, according to our policy balancing urgency and diligence, almost triple our giving in the second half of 2025.

With this new $50M infusion, we’re preparing to scale our deployment again, tripling what we aim to spend down per quarter from about $4M to about $12M.

Leading high-impact philanthropy beyond climate

Climate change is an urgent issue, but it’s far from the only critical problem that philanthropists can help solve. Beyond our Climate Fund, we also operate other funds that are strategically focused on high-impact cause areas and that benefit from our “Funds-first” model:

• Global Catastrophic Risks Fund: mitigates global risks like nuclear war, devastating pandemics, and rogue AI. The Global Catastrophic Risks Fund makes grants that no individual donor could make, making it possible for anyone to help reduce risks from emerging technologies and build safeguards for global stability.
• Rapid Response Fund (launched in partnership with The Life You Can Save): fills critical time-sensitive funding gaps created by the suspension of U.S. foreign aid.
• Global Health and Development Fund: finds impactful ways to reduce deaths and improve the lives of the world’s most vulnerable people.
• Patient Philanthropy Fund: safeguards the long-term future of humanity by creating a “rainy day savings pot” for when philanthropic capital is most needed.

We focus on interventions that are threat-agnostic, robust to worst-case scenarios, and leverage existing societal resources—the same principles that make our climate work effective. Our innovative model allows all donors to invest in specialized, expertly managed philanthropic funds targeting different global challenges. Whether we’re addressing biosecurity, AI safety, or global development, we consistently ask: what are the most neglected, high-leverage opportunities where philanthropic dollars can do the most good?

This $50M gift to our Climate Fund enables us to move faster and think bigger at exactly the moment when battling climate change requires bold action. We’re grateful for this demonstration of trust in our work, and we’re excited to use this funding to continue supporting strategic, high-impact solutions to one of the planet’s most urgent challenges.