Founders Pledge’s 10 Biggest Bets

In ten years of evidence-based grantmaking, Founders Pledge has moved over $323M to organizations we've identified as high-impact through rigorous research and evaluation. You can learn more about our achievements in our 10 Year Impact Report.

From backing groundbreaking climate innovation to preventing catastrophic biological risks, our funding targets important areas where philanthropic capital can drive outsized impact. In this post, we’re sharing 10 of the largest grants from our members and our Funds—and the remarkable impact our grantees are creating in the world.

Global Health & Development

Despite enormous global progress, billions still live in extreme poverty, and proven solutions often fail to reach those who need them most. Grants from Founders Pledge members and our Global Health and Development Fund support evidence-backed interventions that deliver exceptional impact per dollar spent, improving wellbeing for people around the world.

$8M to Teaching at the Right Level Africa (2024)

In Sub-Saharan Africa, 9 out of 10 children cannot read and understand a simple text by age 10. Traditional education systems continue advancing students by age rather than actual learning, leaving millions without basic skills and struggling to catch up once they fall behind.

In 2024, we made an $8M grant, one of our largest investments in education, to Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL) Africa. Students in TaRL programs, which group students by ability rather than age, typically double or triple their reading and math proficiency within one year. The approach costs just $3-15 per student—a fraction of typical education interventions.

Our support for TaRL has helped scale this revolutionary educational approach, which has now helped over 5 million children in Africa build foundational skills.

$6.4M to Innovation in Government Initiative (2024)

Scientific studies like randomized controlled trials (RCTs) often identify highly effective poverty reduction programs that could improve many more lives if implemented at scale. Unfortunately, successful RCTs fail to translate into real-world impact when governments aren’t equipped to scale promising, evidence-based approaches.

In 2024, we granted $6.4M to J-PAL's Innovation in Government Initiative (IGI), enabling them to dramatically scale their work connecting rigorous research with government implementation. Our funding will allow IGI to launch about forty new programs based on successful RCTs, which at historical success rates should lead to approximately fifteen successful scale-ups and attract up to $70M in additional funding.

This is a highly catalytic grant, where a relatively small philanthropic investment has the potential to generate outsized returns in improving lives worldwide.

$5M to Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (2023)

Corruption diverts an estimated $1 trillion annually from developing economies—money that could otherwise fund essential services for people in poverty. Global investigative journalism is crucial for uncovering corruption that might otherwise remain hidden.

The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) conducts cross-border investigative journalism work targeting corruption worldwide. In 2023, a pause in U.S. foreign assistance was threatening to disrupt OCCRP’s operations at a critical moment for their growth.

We provided $5M to OCCRP to help enable them to continue their highly impactful work investigating large-scale corruption. Our grant has helped OCCRP establish a Global Asset Tracking Team dedicated to following money flows across borders and exposing the enablers who facilitate corrupt transactions.

$5M to Bandhan (2024)

Despite global progress, over 250 million people in India lived in extreme poverty (less than $2 a day) in 2021. Women face particular barriers to economic opportunity.

Bandhan’s Targeting the Hardcore Poor (THP) program works to lift extremely poor women in India out of poverty through a research-backed “graduation” approach. Studies show that for every dollar invested, participants gain approximately $5 in benefits—five times more effective than direct cash transfers to those living in poverty.

In 2024, we granted $5M to help Bandhan reach thousands more women living in extreme poverty across eleven Indian states, providing them with productive assets, training, and support to generate sustainable income.

Global Catastrophic Risks

Some threats—like pandemics, nuclear war, or risks from advanced technologies—could cause harm on a truly catastrophic scale. Yet these low-probability, high-consequence risks receive minimal funding relative to their potential impact.

Our Global Catastrophic Risks Fund focuses on preventing these events that could threaten humanity’s long-term future. Our grantmaking aims to reduce risks from emerging technologies and build safeguards for global stability.

$3M to launch IBBIS (2023)

Scientists can now engineer deadly viruses in labs around the globe, due to the biotechnology revolution. Yet nearly every country in the world has no effective national oversight for potentially risky research. International safeguards that could prevent bioengineered catastrophes simply don't exist, leaving humanity defenseless against the tools we've created to manipulate dangerous pathogens.

In 2023, we were approached by the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), the foremost organization working on nuclear security, with the idea of developing a new independent organization dedicated to strengthening global biosecurity norms and best practices. To make this happen, we seeded the International Biosecurity and Biosafety Initiative for Science (IBBIS) with a $3M grant.

IBBIS is now helping governments, researchers, international organizations, and the biotech industry collaborate on promoting critical safeguards for pandemic prevention. They’re beginning by developing a common mechanism for DNA synthesis screening to help prevent misuse, decreasing the risk of new biotechnologies causing another pandemic.

$1.86M to start the Berkeley Risk and Security Lab (2022)

Emerging technologies like AI are rapidly being incorporated into military contexts, which could have unforeseen effects on international security. The next global conflict could be decided not by human judgment, but by algorithms we haven't fully tested—and the window to get this right is closing fast.

In 2022, we provided $1.86M in seed funding to launch the Berkeley Risk and Security Lab (BRSL), a groundbreaking research institute at UC Berkeley focused on existential threats from frontier military technologies. Researchers at this institute have the resources to study the impact of new technologies and the steps governments can take to avoid or mitigate potential risks.

Our early support has enabled BRSL to establish itself as an influential voice in security debates, answering some of the most important questions of the 21st century regarding the future of war and peace.

$2.5M for Carnegie’s “Averting Armageddon” project (2023)

Most nuclear security funding focuses on preventing conflicts from starting, but what happens if deterrence fails? There’s been minimal funding for preventing escalation to all-out nuclear catastrophe, even as we enter a new era of three-way nuclear competition between the US, Russia, and China. Worse yet, the MacArthur Foundation’s withdrawal from nuclear security funding has devastated the field.

Our research indicates that escalation is one of the most significant sources of nuclear risk, which we’ve written about extensively in blog posts and research reports. In 2023, we committed $2.5M to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP) to launch an “Averting Armageddon” project, a three-year initiative focused on reducing the risk of escalation in nuclear conflicts, modeled on the findings in our nuclear report.

This project helps create and advocate strategies that could prevent a limited nuclear exchange from escalating to civilization-destroying levels.

Climate

Climate change is a complex challenge, yet philanthropic funding often clusters around a narrow set of popular solutions rather than the diverse portfolio of approaches we need. Our Climate Fund, the main vehicle for our climate work, backs strategic climate solutions—big bets that could create the conditions for global decarbonization in the years ahead.

$4M to Clean Air Task Force (2021-2022)

Most future emissions will come from developing economies, which are largely powered by carbon-intensive infrastructure, such as coal-fired power plants. Once these plants are built, it’s difficult to shut them down without their communities suffering significant economic losses. This leads to “carbon lock-in,” where existing infrastructure commits us to emissions for decades to come, even as we build clean alternatives.

The Clean Air Task Force (CATF) is an organization that works to reduce air pollution emissions from fossil fuels and to fight climate change while ensuring that people in growing economies have enough energy to meet their needs. In 2021, we committed a multi-year, $4M grant to CATF to support them in becoming a truly global organization.

With the help of this grant, CATF has established new presences in China, India, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, as well as a strengthened presence in Sub-Saharan Africa, so they can support efforts to avoid carbon lock-in in those regions of the world where energy demand growth is concentrated.

$5M to DEPLOY/US (2024)

Even though the American political system puts a high premium on bipartisanship, environmental funders have significantly under-invested in the civil society infrastructure that can rally both parties on climate change. While single left-of-center groups receive over $300M annually, very little philanthropic funding (~$30M) goes to groups that can directly and credibly engage and mobilize right-of-center constituencies on climate issues.

DEPLOY/US is the leading group in the US focused on scaling the capacity and impact of the entire civil society ecosystem working right-of-center on climate change. In 2024, in preparation for the outcome of the US presidential election, we made a bold $5M investment in DEPLOY/US to help them build and equip the Ecoright field.

Our grants to DEPLOY/US made us one of the largest funders of the Ecoright field in 2024. 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.

$3.5M to establish the Innovation Initiative (2025)

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. In March 2025, Breakthrough Energy announced the sudden closure of their policy program at a critical moment, with federal budget negotiations threatening to undo years of progress.

To keep this critical work alive, we made a rapid $3.5M grant from the Climate Fund this April to incubate the Innovation Initiative: a strategic, non-partisan entity led by former Breakthrough Energy staff that can continue driving federal energy innovation policy.

This hub can efficiently resource and organize grantees, align priorities across unlikely partners, and drive policy progress—all crucial steps for empowering continued clean energy innovation.

Join Us in Creating Extraordinary Impact

These grants represent just a fraction of what's possible when entrepreneurs apply the same rigor to their giving as they do to their businesses. We owe these successes to the support of our members and donors. By focusing on neglected problems, backing unconventional solutions, and demanding real evidence of impact, they’ve been transforming philanthropic dollars into extraordinary change.

If you want to join us in supporting high-impact organizations that are tackling the world's most pressing problems, consider donating to one of our Funds.