Update: EAIF is now more funding constrained

By Jamie_Harris, hbesceli @ 2025-05-03T08:58 (+48)

Tl;dr: Over the past few months, the EA Infrastructure Fund’s (EAIF) grantmaking has increased significantly, and funding has become more of a constraint. Your donations would help us continue supporting impactful projects.

The situation

• EA Infrastructure Fund aims to increase the impact of projects that use the principles of effective altruism, by increasing their access to talent, capital, and knowledge.
• In November 2024, we posted saying that EAIF wasn’t funding constrained at the time.
• We’ve recently increased our grantmaking. In 2024 we made $1.9M in grants. So far in 2025 we have made $0.9M in grants and are only a third of the way through the year.
• Our total available fund balance is currently $2.6M, down from $3.3M in November 2024 when we last posted.
• We project that at our 2024 funding bar (i.e. our sense of how promising an application needs to be for us to fund it), we would approve ~$3.5M in grants over 2025, which would be nearly all of our currently available funding.
• Because of this we recently raised our bar for funding, meaning that there are projects that we would have funded previously which we aren’t currently able to fund.
• We also expect to invest significantly more capacity in fundraising later on this year. Our exact plans are to be confirmed following the merger of EA Funds with Centre for Effective Altruism.

Why has this happened?

1. Growth in demand from established organisations

As Open Philanthropy has stepped back from some areas, more organisations are turning to EAIF as a crucial funding source. Some established and successful projects that might otherwise now struggle to secure funding are reaching out to us.^[1]

For example, we have granted $393,510 to one such organisation that has received thousands of applications, and worked closely with hundreds of very promising participants. Alumni have achieved some impressive outcomes in research and policy (e.g. publishing alignment papers at top AI conferences).^[2]

2. Our active grantmaking has worked

Our recent efforts to identify and reach out to high-potential projects have paid off, despite taking less than one week of full-time-equivalent work. We directly contacted some promising potential applicants, wrote an EA Forum post, and ran a workshop at EA Global Bay Area.

One applicant we have funded who explicitly told us that these efforts convinced her to apply is August Hochman for Ark Philanthropy, an ultra-high-net-worth philanthropic advisory nonprofit startup. Ark has a very promising early track record of counterfactual fundraising, supporting donors to give to high-impact projects such as those recommended by Animal Charity Evaluators. We expect Ark to advise millions of dollars in donations within the next year, and have provided them with $280,265 to pursue ambitious plans for scaling.

3. We continue to fill an important role in the EA funding ecosystem

Of course, the above two factors have added to an ongoing stream of applications for funding, and we continue to receive applications from projects unaffected by OP withdrawal or our own active grantmaking efforts.

For example, we recently granted $50k to Rethink Wellbeing to run a mental health program for ~175 EAs, to help them feel and perform better.^[3] The intervention is based on strong empirical research and the team seems well placed to execute on the project. Their modelling suggested that the program would generate well-being and productivity gains worth ~30 full-time-equivalent years of work for pressing problems; even if this estimate is a little optimistic, we still expect it to be a very cost-effective intervention.

Room for additional funding

We previously said that additional funding to EAIF wouldn’t have significantly changed our grantmaking. This is now no longer the case, and if we had more money we expect we would in fact be making more grants!^[4]

Additional donations would enable us to keep funding impactful EA infrastructure projects without needing to increase our funding bar further than we already have.

If you believe in the value of a strong EA ecosystem and want to help ensure that EAIF can continue to support high-impact projects, we encourage you to donate, which you can do here.

Thank you very much to our applicants, advisors, and donors for making this work possible. We welcome questions in the comments below.

1. ^{^}

    These orgs usually have at least one other funding source, but we have still seen room for more funding that seems cost-effective on the margin.

2. ^{^}

    They asked us to remain anonymous for now.

3. ^{^}

    Applications for this program, The CBT Lab 2025, are still open (deadline 8th May).

4. ^{^}

    Whether our funding is constrained at any given time is primarily a function of (1) our own available funding reserves and (2) the specific grant applications we receive. It is not a commentary on the overall vitality of the EA ecosystem or its potential to grow or get stronger: we believe there are many potentially promising projects which could contribute to this growth/strengthening, and we are excited to receive many more applications. We shared some ideas about applications we’d be especially keen to receive late last year; EAIF is now more funding-constrained, but we have only slightly increased our bar and will still be able to fund strong applications.