Who we’d like as regrantors

By Carol N, Austin @ 2026-08-14T17:44 (+3)

This is a linkpost to https://manifund.substack.com/p/who-wed-like-as-regrantors

Following up on Regranting in 2026, here are some people we’d be excited to have as regrantors!

Good regrantors have at least one, and preferably more than one, of taste, dealflow, and hustle. We’ve divided them into rough categories with a bit of explanation, though many of these people could fall into a few different categories. If we raise $2m for regranting, we’d love to give each of these people a $50k pot.

To be clear, this is not a list of people who’ve agreed to be regrantors! Many have said yes, but for many, we don’t know yet whether they’d be interested.

Regrantors list

Previous Manifund regrantors

This is the most obvious category: people who have been Manifund regrantors in the past and made grants that looked good.

To be clear, we’re happy with every one of our past regrantors — possibly excepting Qualy the Lightbulb — and would love to have them back, if they so chose.

Others with good track records

In general, we’re super excited about creating more of a feedback loop between “has made good calls in the past” and “has more money to make grants with now.”

Lab employees

Lab employees have a ton of context and expertise that those outside generally don’t. This category, along with the category below of “investors,” is a bit confusing, because these people might be reasonably expected to have made enough money from their careers that Manifund doesn’t need to be giving them more. However, we’re interested in piloting a program where they can partly fund their own regranting.

Investors

The skill set of good investors has a lot of overlap with the skills of a grantmaker. We’re excited about having people in the pool who can apply more of an “investing mindset.”

Founders & successful grantees

This category can be tricky, because they’re often quite busy. But founders of successful organizations often have good instincts about what makes a good founder, and networks rich in promising people. These five all got early funding from Manifund, and we think it’s good to have a Manifund network that expands in this way.

Policy and advocacy

A lot of our past regrants have been more focused on technical AI safety, but we’d love to broaden that more to people thinking about policy and advocacy.

People with interesting networks

Our list could use more of this, but one thing we want is people who diversify our network to different fields, countries, organizations, or age groups.

Take-havers

We’re also excited about giving regranting pots to anyone else with good and unique takes on AI.

We’re also generally interested in adding more investors, people with diverse networks, people in AI welfare/rights, and people in forecasting to the list.

Is it disqualifying if a regrantor …

… is busy?

Regranting takes some time. Ideally, a regrantor has the bandwidth (say at least 5 hours a month) to network with people, research grants, follow up with grantees, and provide ongoing support. But we think even quite busy people can be great regrantors, especially if their day job leads to them coming across good opportunities.

… has other funds to make grants with?

Not necessarily. Even professional grantmakers can come across grants that they aren’t able to make through their day job, whether it’s because they’re too small, too weird, off-topic, or for any other reason. For this reason, we’re excited to invite grantmakers from orgs like cG, Longview, and Macroscopic to participate this time around.

We did err on the side of listing people we think are less likely to have other good ways to make grants; for instance, there isn’t a ton of overlap between our list and the Lightcone Commons evaluator list. (We still expect some overlap to be reasonable, as regranting budgets offer more discretion and autonomy.)

… is contrarian or controversial?

We don’t think it should be. Part of the thesis of regranting is that it’s good to have funding decisions less centralized, to promote an intellectually diverse ecosystem.