For a Berkeley, California-based nonprofit funded by a crypto billionaire and planning to spend tens of millions of dollars to prepare for the possibility that AI may become sentient, the Navigation Fund has one of the most generic mission statements I’ve encountered in philanthropy: “Advancing bold solutions to the world’s most urgent problems.”
“Well, that’s definitely good feedback,” said President David Coman-Hidy when I (rudely) suggested as much. “Listen, we don’t have a comms employee. I think I’m probably responsible for most of that.”
But the unimaginative copywriting — which is hard-to-miss on the fund’s homepage — belies Coman-Hidy and his board’s fascinating and uncommon vision for the two-year-old grantmaker.
Aside from its president’s patience with impudent journalists, the fund is notable for a $1.3 billion endowment, which makes it an important force to watch in its chosen fields: scientific research, farm animal welfare, criminal justice, climate change, and, in the fund’s words, “digital sentience.”
Formerly the president of the Humane League, Coman-Hidy has largely hired from the fields the fund aims to impact, not from the ranks of professional philanthropy. He and the board plan to give staff the freedom to move quickly and fund as they see fit. Their hope is that the model will attract additional donors to the fund, which, in another distinctive choice, is set up as a public charity to be able to accept such contributions.
“Coming from that world and interacting with a lot of philanthropy… it was really important to me that we did things a little bit differently,” he said. “I think we have an unusually high level of agency and trust for the program officers because we’re kind of betting on their theses.”
In short, this fund looks like it’ll be guided by individual visions, not a single overarching one. But even more interesting than how it’s structured may be how this philanthropy is funded — by a cloud computing spin-off created by its founder to advance the development of AI. But before we get to that, let’s look at the billionaire couple behind this fund and where its dollars are going so far.
Meet the Navigation Fund’s billionaire founding couple
The Navigation Fund’s founding donors are one of today’s notable science-tech power couples: blockchain pioneer and crypto entrepreneur Jed McCaleb, whose wealth Fortune estimates at nearly $3 billion, and Seemay Chou, the CEO of Arcadia Science. So far, Chou has been more closely involved, and now serves as board chair. The pair, who are married, are cofounders of Arcadia and an AI-focused nonprofit called Astera Institute.
Called the Further Future Foundation until Coman-Hidy came on board — “FFF wasn’t doing it for me,” he said with a laugh — and now legally the Navigation Charitable Fund, the operation started slowly, making just $4.1 million in grants its first year against nearly $1 million in other expenses. (Unlike private foundations, public charities face no minimum payout requirement.)
But grantmaking grew to $36.8 million in 2024 and will “potentially double” this year, Coman-Hidy said. Each portfolio area — scientific research, farm animal welfare, criminal justice, climate change and digital sentience — will have a different budget total, based on board priorities, as well as potential grantees. A job posting advertised the fund’s “AI safety” portfolio budget as $20 million a year, but Coman-Hidy played down that figure.
“For the digital sentience program, for example, it would take a long time to get up to that level of spending, given the opportunities in the field at the moment,” Coman-Hidy said. He added in a follow-up email that the amount will be lower due to the program’s narrowed focus on digital sentience rather than AI safety broadly.
The public charity has already attracted outside support: Its farmed animal welfare program has attracted $3 million in donations, including a $1 million investment from Alpha Epsilon, a fund whose partners include Founders Pledge, GiveWell and Renaissance Philanthropy.
McCaleb and Chou’s multidonor model with the Navigation Fund, anchored by a founding mega gift, is unusual among today’s billionaires, who usually want the reputational gains of a philanthropy, or at least control, for themselves. But there are analogs. For instance, Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy includes several grantmaking public charities, which allows for a variety of contributors, though it is unclear how many others have bought in.
Who is the Navigation Fund backing?
Look for a 990 filing for the Navigation Fund and you’ll currently find just one, for 2023, that lists just two awards: $1.8 million to a donor-advised fund at Vanguard for criminal justice reform and $2.4 million to the Humane America Animal Foundation.
At that point, the foundation lacked the staff to make grants, so it sent its funding out to regrantors, Coman-Hidy said. The funds were ultimately distributed to farm animal groups, including Anima International, Albert Schweitzer Foundation and New Roots Institute, as well as criminal justice organizations Recidiviz, Bonafide, Just Impact, Council on Criminal Justice and Homeboy Industries.
Other farm animal welfare groups the Navigation Fund has supported since 2024 include Sinergia Animal, Animal Justice, Animal Advocacy Careers, Worldshapers, Animal Defense Partnership, Animal Enterprise Transparency Project, Animal Policy International, Fórum Nacional de Proteção e Defesa Animal, Frente Animal, Hive and the Estonia-based Nähtamatud Loomad.
Its recent climate grantees are the Environmental Defense Fund, [C]Worthy, Spark Climate Solutions, Carbon to Sea, Degrees, Ocean Visions, Cascade Climate and Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development. There are only two digital sentience grantees: the NYU Center for Mind, Ethics and Policy as well as Professor Jonathan Birch of the London School of Economics and Political Science. The fund did not share grant totals.
Public announcements give another glimpse of what it is up to. This summer, the fund held an RFP on AI for scientific research and partnered with Longview Philanthropy and Macroscopic Ventures to launch a new Consortium for Digital Sentience Research and Applied Work, which issued its own RFPs. The fund has also backed a project to save the so-called “Doomsday Glacier,” and last month it announced nine awards from an RFP for laid-off government workers seeking funding for climate change projects.
One of the practices the fund intends to implement is invitation-only funding cycles: “We know that an open-call approach will result in hundreds — or even thousands — of wasted application hours,” reads its website. Yet RFPs, at least at this stage, have been a key tool. Coman-Hidy said that’s due to the nascent state of the fields it is funding. “It’s not the case that an RFP is going to generate five-dozen applications,” he said. “What we’re trying to do is catalyze something in the space.”
Another outlook on the fund’s priorities comes from its detailed program overviews. Each program officer must submit a plan to the organization’s board that covers their short-term and long-term strategy, with annual updates required as policy and opportunities shift. An abbreviated version of that document is posted on the fund’s website, offering a guide both to grantees and would-be donors to the fund.
Such transparency is a hallmark of effective altruist philanthropy. So, too, is an interest in farmed animal welfare, and the fund has several staff with experience in that field, including its president. But Coman-Hidy said the effective altruism label does not fit the fund, noting neither its donors nor most program officers are from the EA sphere.
“We definitely are looking to fund cause areas that are very neglected, to use one of their words. So it’s not surprising to me that we have some overlap,” he said. “We draw inspiration from a number of different approaches to philanthropy and are not following any particular one of them.”
Related Inside Philanthropy Resources:
For Subscribers Only
What about that AI spin-off?
Here’s another way the Navigation Fund stands out: The full story of its assets is far more complicated than the average grantmaker’s list of, say, stock holdings and private equity investments.
In late 2023, Reuters reported that a nonprofit funded by Jed McCaleb had purchased roughly $500 million of NVIDIA advanced GPUs — the pricey and scarce computer chips central to AI development — to set up a for-profit spin-off operation called Voltage Park that planned to lease computing capacity to AI projects. In the story’s final paragraph, the nonprofit purchaser was revealed as the Navigation Fund, which, as the primary owner of Voltage Park (some employees have equity stakes), will receive all of its profits.
In other words, a for-profit corporation providing AI cloud computing capacity is essentially the main funding source and asset base for a grantmaking organization that plans one day to spend millions of dollars annually to address the potential that AI may attain sentience.
The fund, incidentally, valued Voltage Park at $883 million in its 2023 IRS filing, accounting for roughly three-quarters of its total assets. McCaleb is not on the board of directors of either organization.
For AI boosters, who presumably include McCaleb and possibly Chou, the setup might be seen as a noble way to help AI reach its full potential while exploring the possibility of AI sentience, which the fund seems to count as more of a moral quandary than a mortal threat.
Yet AI critics might see the structure as naive: a teaspoon of precautionary water (i.e., the AI grantmaking) generated by pouring gallons of kerosene (the hundreds of millions of dollars invested in Voltage Park) onto an already vigorous fire.
“The chips seemed like a smart investment given how important the technology is and how critical access can be (especially back then, with so much uncertainty!),” Coman-Hidy said. “We believe and hope AI will be an important part of the change we want to see.”
He noted that Voltage Park has supported FutureHouse, a nonprofit building tools for scientific research, and a federal-level initiative on responsible AI, the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource Pilot.
Again, this structure, to me, has echoes of Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy. Breakthrough’s (recently downsized) climate grantmaking was largely in service of its much-larger, multipartner venture capital climate bets, while the Navigation Fund’s grantmaking on AI and elsewhere is made possible mainly by a major AI investment. Philanthropy, in both cases, is a minor offshoot of larger private-sector investments (even if the Navigation Fund is also the owner of Voltage Park).
With billionaires increasingly treating business and philanthropy as a continuum — see the excellent New York Times profile of billionaire Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison’s profit-oriented philanthropic pursuits for a recent example — perhaps we should see the Navigation Fund as one more sign of where philanthropy is headed.
