Update: AIM’s Founding to Give Program

By Jacintha Baas, T.K., Ambitious Impact @ 2026-06-23T12:29 (+104)

TLDR: AIM won’t run another round of Founding to Give at this time, but we’d be excited for someone else to run (an amended version) of it 

AIM launched the Founding to Give program two years ago to incubate for-profit startups with the goal of creating (1) impact via donations and (2) directly through company activities. 

Since then, we have run 2 cohorts for which we had over 3,000 applications, selected 38 founders who all pledged 50% of their exit money to effective charities, and launched 24 startups. We’ve been positively surprised at the level of talent we’ve been able to recruit for a program including many repeat founders who have substantial technical expertise or have raised substantial funding in the past.  We have been incredibly impressed with the FTG founders, several of whom have gone on to be selected for top tier accelerators such as Entrepreneur First, Antler, YC, and Techstars. 

We think that FTG has shown multiple compelling theories of change, but the best versions of those ToCs would take us quite far outside of AIM’s main focus in the effective nonprofit space, and require substantially different models/talent profiles/connections relative to AIM’s current comparative advantages. As part of our overall strategy to focus more strongly on our core theory of change of incubating high-impact non-profits, AIM will therefore not be running another cohort of Founding to Give at this time. However, we’re actively scouting orgs/people who are well-positioned to run different versions of FTG that we believe to be impactful and cost-effective.

We’ve written more in-depth learnings here, which we hope will be useful for people who are either looking to launch impactful startups themselves, or those who are looking to do more for-profit incubation in the EA space. In the meantime, we wanted to share some headlines on which models we believe are promising and warrant further exploration. 

 

What are the most compelling versions of “for-profit impact incubation?”

Through the last two years, we’ve learned a lot about catalyzing for-profit impact. FTG has shown multiple different compelling models of for-profit impact incubation.  We think that each of these models would benefit from being more focused and purpose-built, rather than housed in one broad program like we ran for the past two cohorts. 

 

Vertical-specific incubators  

Through our work on the Founding to Give cohort, we’ve become much more bullish about incubating startups that are for-profit, have venture scale potential, can be funded through ‘regular’ commercial capital, and create significant impact directly. We wrote more about this here: Can for-profit companies create significant, direct impact? However, both from modeling the impact of existing companies and as well as new company ideas, we’ve found that they appear to exist mostly within a handful of verticals (biotech, health, emerging markets, climate, talent), specifically where profit incentives and commercial incentives overlap (for example, in countries with high levels of healthcare insurance, preventing (re-)hospitalisation is profitable). We think that vertical-specific incubators, running cohorts like “healthcare in India” or “accelerating clinical trials” would be the best format, and provide higher cofounder matchability than our broad program did, as well as stronger network connections to customers, advisors, and investors. For those considering building companies that create direct impact, we’ve written this resource to help find strong ideas.

 

Earn to give entrepreneurship 

Earn to give entrepreneurship can yield high donation potential, but the distribution of outcomes is heavily skewed given the hits-based nature of entrepreneurship. We’ve seen that skew and uncertainty go up even more in the last 2 years with AI drastically changing how software is built/valued and sending the VC industry in flux. We think this path is promising, but only for founders with high founder-market-fit for this path, who are building companies on the frontiers of AI.  We expect an optimized version of this program would include larger cohorts/scale (hundreds of companies per year), and be fully optimized for large exits (based in San Francisco, for example). We also think that someone who builds a program like this should be cognizant that the type of founder who would be a great fit for this path often has expensive counterfactuals, as well as being aware of other work being done in this space (e.g. by Founders Pledge, which services this target audience at a later stage of their growth journey). Our resources include a little tool to help founders compare founding a startup to donate versus working and donating in a more classic earn-to-give approach. 

 

Revenue-generating impact 

Through our research, we found quite a few ideas that were not exactly venture scale, but seemed like they could be revenue-generating/cost covering, and highly impactful (e.g. animal welfare tech that gives some commercial benefits to farmers). Since these would likely require philanthropic money to get started, we should hold these ideas to the same standard for impact as other high-impact non-profits such as those we incubate through our Charity Entrepreneurship program. AIM plans to explore some revenue-generating ideas in upcoming research rounds, and if we find ideas that are promising, support them through our regular Charity Entrepreneurship program. 

 

What’s next?

If you or someone you know might be interested in building, running, or funding a for-profit impact incubator in the areas we identified, please reach out at jacintha@charityentrepreneurship.com – we may be able to support them. We’re specifically interested in meeting builders/domain experts in biotech, healthtech, or emerging markets with previous founding experience who would consider running a vertical-specific incubator geared towards maximizing impact.

If you’re exploring for-profit entrepreneurship as a path to impact, you can find our learnings and resources here. High Impact Professionals is also hosting an impact accelerator program with an entrepreneurship track, which might be helpful for those looking for structured support. 

If you’re running accelerators or incubators that (also) does for profit incubation in the EA space, you can read more of our learnings here.

 

To finish

We wanted to extend a big thank you to the FTG founders, all the supporters we had on our journey, and the AIM community and team for building out Founding to Give.

Austin @ 2026-06-24T03:19 (+16)

Thank you for the retro! As we're planning out our own incubator for for-profits that do good (Surplus), I really appreciated the section on "advice for other incubators". We are indeed providing seed funding ($100k), and are focusing on software as a vertical (and specifically AI for epistemics, community infra, and informative websites), so I'm hoping that we'll be able to improve on Founding to Give. It's also a 3-mo IRL cohort in SF!

Jacintha Baas @ 2026-06-24T16:11 (+1)

Great to hear it's been useful :) 

NickLaing @ 2026-06-24T07:11 (+6)

One thing I really like about founding to give programs, is that we have very clear metrics for success. We'll know over 2-5 years if these programs were successful or not. 

I haven't seen the success metrics, but I'm guessing It probably only takes 1 or 2 successful companies to make the whole thing worth it and I'm hoping the cohorts can do even better than this!

Jacintha Baas @ 2026-06-24T16:25 (+7)

Agreed! To get a sense of the success metrics: the total costs of the program were quite lean - we estimate our costs at +-260k pounds in direct costs per cohort, consisting mostly of staff costs and stipends (though I do think these costs might be higher when launched as an independent org because we were able to make use of AIM infrastructure effectively) which means that it would indeed take only 1 successful company to either exit (or achieve a multiple of this in 'direct impact').

aclearbag @ 2026-07-08T06:22 (+4)

Super interesting to read about this program! How did you persuade people to commit 50% of their exit to effective charities? 

If folks were already earning-to-give minded and entrepreneurially inclined, the odds were that they would build and then give their wealth away (eg: Ratan Tata) so the counterfactual impact here is low. If they weren't already earning-to-give minded, why were they signing up for an accelerator that requires them to give up 50% of their wealth? 

Could you help me understand the mechanics of this a bit more? Super interesting work!

Jacintha Baas @ 2026-07-08T19:35 (+6)

Thanks, great question! I can share some data we have from internal surveys and interviews we conducted though this will always be somewhat speculative and personal per founder.

I think it’s good to pull apart the decision to build and to give their wealth away because I think the mechanics and counterfactuals are different.

  • You’re right that we are not creating founders from scratch. In our pre-program surveys the median founder put their odds of founding something within three years at ~65–75% even if FTG hadn't existed. So the counterfactual on whether they launch a startup is probably somewhat modest (we're mostly accelerating and de-risking a decision people were already leaning toward). Please note that this is self-reported data - a somewhat smaller subset of participants had already taken steps towards building a startup like quitting their job so we might have made a bit more of an impact here.
  • However, there does seem to be a strong counterfactual on the giving. Asked what share of an exit they would have donated without the program, this was roughly 10%, whereas the program mandated a 50% minimum. 
  • So why join if you're not already a very committed 50%-giver? 
    • Some of it is likely because people aren't joining for the pledge specifically - but for the accelerator (cofounder matching, the selection signal, structure, community) and accepting the pledge as the entry condition. 
    • But also, interestingly, when we asked our last cohort if the pledge was a positive or a negative reason, the cohort overwhelmingly said it was a positive reason to join (as they believed it would produce a cohort of truly aligned people). I believe only 1 person marked it as a slight negative in their decision.
    • When we asked the cohort more open ended-questions on why people decided to give so generously even when they hadnt considered this before, many of them just said that ‘noone had asked them before’ and ‘upon considering they just realised they weren’t launching this startup for the money anyway’. They also often mentioned the effect of all the others doing the same, and it being attractive to have mutual accountability. 

      Hopefully this helps!
aclearbag @ 2026-07-09T04:57 (+1)

So interesting! From the outset, this idea made no sense but now it feels quite ingenious.

It seems like this accelerator worked in a similar way to the Giving What We Can pledge – most people who sign that pledge would've probably already donated 2-3% of their wealth, but signing the pledge makes that number go up to 10% or more because the 10% anchor makes them rethink what an appropriate number might be and also provides social proof that it is a reasonable thing. Similarly here, the participants would've already given 10% away, but the program made it reasonable and socially validated to say "yeah, we'll give half of it away, that sounds reasonable". Is this a good rephrase? 

Self-selection effects on the program are also interesting here - would you say the accelerator community was particularly better than any other accelerator community? More generous and helpful, similar core values, etc. 

defun 🔸 @ 2026-07-02T08:56 (+2)

Thanks for the post!

selected for top tier accelerators such as Entrepreneur First, Antler, YC, and Techstars

Can I ask which ones? Especially interested in YC.

David_R 🔸 @ 2026-06-29T21:45 (+2)

Thank you so much for making so many great linked resources about FTG available for free!