Renaissance Philanthropy Fund
New York, NY · EIN 99-1953380. Reported 33 grants totalling $6,594,737 to 30 organizations across tax years 2024-2025, on Form 990 Schedule I.
Does this grantmaker accept applications?
Its tax return does not say, and we will not guess. Private foundations file Form 990-PF, which asks outright whether they fund only organizations they select themselves -- 78% say yes, and that one answer is what lets the rest of this site tell you which foundations are worth approaching. Grantmaking charities like this one file a regular Form 990 instead, and the IRS never puts the question to them. Anyone claiming to know the answer from the filing is inventing it.
Three things in the filing do bear on it:
- What kind of organization it is. For Renaissance Philanthropy Fund, by its IRS classification it raises and distributes funds for science & technology (NTEE U12).
- How spread out its giving is. 30 distinct organizations, with 27% of the dollars going to the largest single recipient. That is genuinely spread out -- the mark of a funder making many independent decisions rather than underwriting one institution.
How big are its grants?
The median reported grant is $121,000. Half of what it reported fell between $50,000 and $249,996; the smallest was $10,000 and the largest $1,757,657. If you are asking for materially more than the top of that range, you are asking the wrong organization.
Every organization it funded
This is the complete list from its filings, largest first. Recipients are grouped by the EIN the filer reported, not by name, so an organization that was typed differently in two years appears once rather than twice.
| Organization | Location | Total received | Grants | Years funded | Last |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Learning Agency | Arlington, VA | $1,757,657 | 1 | 1 | 2025 |
| Regents of the University of California at Berkeley | Riverside, CA | $755,564 | 3 | 1 | 2025 |
| The Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University | Stanford, CA | $648,970 | 1 | 1 | 2025 |
| Human Computation Institute | Ithaca, NY | $402,270 | 1 | 1 | 2025 |
| University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | Chapel Hill, NC | $320,588 | 1 | 1 | 2025 |
| American Immigration Council | Washington, DC | $250,000 | 1 | 1 | 2025 |
| The University of Texas at Austin | Austin, TX | $250,000 | 1 | 1 | 2025 |
| Trustees of Columbia University | New York, NY | $249,996 | 1 | 1 | 2025 |
| Brown University of Providence | Providence, RI | $178,450 | 1 | 1 | 2025 |
| Rutgers the State University | Piscataway, NJ | $175,920 | 1 | 1 | 2025 |
| New York University | New York, NY | $160,000 | 1 | 1 | 2025 |
| Cambridge in America | New York, NY | $158,000 | 1 | 1 | 2025 |
| Massachusetts Institute of Technology | Cambridge, MA | $142,987 | 1 | 1 | 2025 |
| Princeton University | Princeton, NJ | $122,845 | 1 | 1 | 2025 |
| Regents of the University of Michigan | Ann Arbor, MI | $121,000 | 1 | 1 | 2025 |
| Eleutherai Institute | Washington, DC | $120,500 | 1 | 1 | 2025 |
| Cornell University | Ithaca, NY | $101,200 | 1 | 1 | 2025 |
| Georgia Tech Research Corporation | Atlanta, GA | $100,541 | 1 | 1 | 2025 |
| Center on Rural Innovation Inc | Hartland, VT | $100,000 | 1 | 1 | 2025 |
| STEM for Development | Washington, DC | $100,000 | 1 | 1 | 2025 |
| South Carolina Research Foundation | Columbia, SC | $95,727 | 1 | 1 | 2025 |
| Energy for Growth Hub | Washington, DC | $75,000 | 1 | 1 | 2025 |
| Digital Harbor Foundation Inc | Baltimore, MD | $60,000 | 2 | 2 | 2025 |
| California Institute of Technology | Pasadena, CA | $31,322 | 1 | 1 | 2025 |
| Good Science Project | Roswell, GA | $30,000 | 1 | 1 | 2025 |
| Roots of Progress | Beaverton, OR | $28,700 | 1 | 1 | 2025 |
| The Foundation for American Innovation | Washington, DC | $25,000 | 1 | 1 | 2025 |
| Foundation for Innovation in Healthy Food | Wilmington, DE | $12,500 | 1 | 1 | 2025 |
| The Foresight Institute | San Francisco, CA | $10,000 | 1 | 1 | 2025 |
| Unlock Aid Coalition | Washington, DC | $10,000 | 1 | 1 | 2025 |
1 of 30 (3%) received money in more than one year over the 2 years we hold. Remember the $5,000 floor: an organization funded every year at $3,000 shows up here as never funded at all.
What the money was for
Taken verbatim from the purpose column of its filings, largest first. This is the closest thing to a statement of what it funds, in its own words.
- The Learning Agency
To support projects that apply AI to mathematics - American Immigration Council
To support talent mobility - Massachusetts Institute of Technology (mit)
To support AI for science - Good Science Project
To support policy entrepreneurship - Foundation for Innovation in Healthy Food
To support work on cardiovascular nutrition - Foresight Institute
2024 Foresight Molecular Machines Workshop
What kind of organizations it funds
By the activity category the IRS assigns each recipient, for the 24 of 30 recipients we could match to a registered organization. The categories are the IRS's, not ours -- Schedule I reports the recipient's EIN, so this is a lookup rather than a name match.
Giving by year
| Tax year | Grants reported | Total | Median grant |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | 1 | $10,000 | $10,000 |
| 2025 | 32 | $6,584,737 | $121,922 |
Tax years, not calendar years, and the most recent year is usually incomplete -- Form 990 arrives about a year after the year it covers, so a low final year means late paperwork rather than a grantmaker winding down.
Where its money goes
27% of its giving went to organizations in Virginia. Community foundations and federated funds are usually the most geographically bounded funders there are -- being outside the footprint is normally disqualifying in a way that a weak programme fit is not.
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Funders that support the same organizations
These grantmakers and private foundations gave to organizations this one also funded. Shared grantees are a sign of overlapping priorities and nothing more: they do not show that any of these funders would consider a new organization. Each page says what its filings show.
How to approach this grantmaker
- Look for a published programme first. Unlike most private foundations, organizations of this kind often do run open, deadlined grant cycles with written guidelines. Its own website is the authority on that; this page is the authority on who it has actually paid.
- Check you are its size. The median reported grant is $121,000 -- and because grants under $5,000 need not be reported, it very likely writes smaller cheques than this page can see.
- Check you are in its geography. Its giving concentrates in Virginia.
- Read the recipient list for organizations like yours. If nothing on it resembles your work, that is a real answer and a cheap one to get.
Related guides
Where these numbers come from
Everything above is taken from Renaissance Philanthropy Fund's own Form 990 Schedule I filings, which the IRS publishes in bulk. We used 2 returns (tax years 2024-2025). Grant figures are from its returns. Recipient classifications, the concentration and retention figures and the funders that support the same organizations are our own calculations from them, described in how we build this.
On its most recent return it told the IRS it made grants to 32 section 501(c)(3) organizations and 0 other organizations. That is the filer's own count for one year; the totals above cover every year we hold.
Address of record on the latest return: 42 Broadway 12TH Fl, New York, NY, 10004.
EIN 99-1953380 · See the original filings on ProPublica · How we build this
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