Funding search
Find who already funds work like yours.
Private foundations don’t post open calls, so nobody can search them. We read IRS filings instead — 9.6 million grants from 174,053 foundations and grantmaking charities, searchable by what the money was actually for.
12 funders with a record of paying for “theory”
Where the money went
Largest: $8,400 to QUEENS COLLEGE — study in dynamical systems and ergodic theory and number theory
Largest: $900,000 to BEN-GURION UNIVERSITY OF THE NEGEV — to conduct experiments at the interface between quantum mechanics and general relativity, the two pillars of modern physics; understanding how the two theories work together has th…
The Schott Foundation for PublicCambridge, MACharity · may take applications
28 matching grants · $1.2M · through 2022Largest: $125,000 to SOUTHERN COALITION FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE — to support education justice alliance's work seeking to resist politically motivated attacks on critical race theory in order to advance an honest, accurate, and fully funded publi…
John Templeton FoundationWest Conshohocken, PA
17 matching grants · $3.9M · through 2024Largest: $85,876 to REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY — tex fellowship: unifying mind & machine: new theories of physics with machine learning
Largest: $3.0M to MATS RESEARCH INC — ml alignment & theory scholars winter 24-25 cohort
Largest: $476,476 to REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO — for studying how amo physics can inform the development of gravity theories
Largest: $570,000 to BARD COLLEGE — to provide support for open society university network undergraduate student mobility and scholarships to students attending birkbeck's 2024 london critical theory summer school
Largest: $370,044 to HARVARD UNIVERSITY — to study algorithmic fairness by developing a theory of principled scoring functions based on notions about pseudorandomness and multicalibration
Largest: $104,526 to CENTRE FOR BUDGET AND POLICY STUDIES — for research and dissemination to develop theories of social change in order to influence the larger social discourse around gender violence in public spaces
Largest: $50,000 to The SUNY Black Faculty and Staff Collective — black critical theory (blackcrit) research conference
Largest: $241,279 to RUTGERS ST U OF NJ NEW BRUNSWICK — 80564 advancing theory, research, and practice in designing public health data dashboards to better communicate complex information to a diverse audience
Largest: $6.3M to UCLA DEVELOPMENT — big bang theory scholarship fund and cardiology program
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Source: IRS Form 990-PF Part XV and Form 990 Schedule I, tax years 2019–2025. These are grants already paid, a record of what an organization funds rather than an open call. Private foundations rarely accept unsolicited applications and the route in is usually a program officer; grantmaking charities and associations more often run real application cycles, so check their website. How this data is built, and its limits →