How a New Philanthropy Advisory Firm Aims to Drive Science and Tech Innovation

Philanthropists and foundation professionals focused on science and technology often cite as one of the sector's key strengths its flexibility and willingness to fund out-of-the-box ideas, novel but potentially valuable research that can't land more risk-averse federal grantmaking. But some research and development ideas still don't fit well into current philanthropic models of giving, such as the development of new technologies or innovations that require involvement from a mix of business, academia, government and philanthropy.

Renaissance Philanthropy, a newly launched science philanthropy advisory nonprofit, seeks to cultivate resources for ambitious science and technology goals that don't fit into existing funding models — such as ones too big for academia, but not profitable enough for venture startup funding — that nevertheless offer great potential benefits to science and society.

Renaissance will be headed up by two veterans of government science and technology policy and philanthropy: Tom Kalil as CEO and Kumar Garg as president. Kalil comes from a post as chief innovation officer at Schmidt Futures; he was also previously deputy director for policy in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy under President Barack Obama. Garg, who was vice president of partnerships at Schmidt Futures, also has extensive background in science and technology policy roles, including as assistant director at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy during the Obama administration.

Initial funding to launch Renaissance came from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his wife Wendy, themselves increasingly active and expansive funders of science and tech philanthropy. As noted, both Kalil and Garg came out of Schmidt Futures, a longtime hub for the Schmidts’ philanthropic endeavors, and they're taking the lessons and practices from their experience there and in the federal government in STEM research and policy as they build Renaissance Philanthropy.

I spoke recently with Garg about the gaps in science funding Renaissance Philanthropy seeks to fill. Rather than advise clients on how to make individual grants to a single investigator or institution, as is typical in science giving, Renaissance aims to help find and fund ambitious, game-changing ideas that have the potential to significantly advance a field of science or technology, but that are too large and multifaceted to be tackled by any single lab or institution. To do that, Renaissance will need to carve out new ways to assemble teams and new ways to connect donors with those projects.

"I think that there's a utility in an organization mapping a space and bringing donors along, because the donor or their advisor cannot maintain all of these relationships," Garg said. "Part of our goal is to be in active touch with lots of these emerging ideas in science and technology."

Renaissance will help give structure to those big ideas by helping to create the multisector teams of researchers and engineers necessary to develop a new technology or solution. This model will not only give potential funders a concrete entity to support, Garg said, but will also give researchers and tech developers a new way to imagine goals in their fields by showing that funding for novel research may actually be attainable. It's what Renaissance calls "a virtuous loop of increasing ambition and impact between philanthropists and innovators."

Tapping the emerging donor community

Renaissance will also seek to attract more funders to big science and tech giving, with a particular focus on high-net-worth individuals who have not yet entered or fully ramped up their philanthropy, Garg said. He cited a 2018 Bridgespan Group report on families with more than $500 million in wealth that found that the rate of philanthropic giving in this group was only about 1.2%. Those surveyed said they were too busy with careers and family to focus on philanthropy, and many who might wish to fund science simply don't know how to determine good investments within those technical fields.

This is where Garg said the Renaissance leadership’s expertise in creating new cross-sector research and development teams with clear goals — the kind of coalition that sped the development of COVID vaccines, for example — can make a difference to these potential givers.

"There's a huge value… in connecting new philanthropists to the most promising ideas," Garg said. "We're going to make that an explicit part of what Renaissance is about, which is how to help this generation of emerging donors get off the sidelines and navigate the immense opportunities in science and tech."

Entering science philanthropy at this level can be intimidating for potential donors who are both inexperienced in science philanthropy and have not assembled foundations or teams of advisors with the expertise to study and understand the landscape in any given field of advanced science or technology research.

Although Renaissance Philanthropy’s aims may be relatively novel in the science philanthropy space, they’re all too familiar in the broader context of a philanthrosphere growing ever more crowded with funding intermediaries, advisory firms and consultancies. In a variety of other contexts and issue areas, from progressive movement building to the administration of philanthropic competitions, services offering donors expertise in how to give, and to whom, are flourishing – often with philanthropic backing themselves. Renaissance is operating in a distinctive space, but it’s also yet another example of this longstanding sector trend.

Schmidt science funding: an evolving story

As for the Schmidts, cultivating the infrastructure for nonprofit science research and funding is nothing new, either. The launch of the Schmidt-backed Renaissance comes three years after the Schmidts established the science nonprofit Convergent Research with a related goal to incubate new ideas in science through structures called Focused Research Organizations. These organizations seek to develop major projects that are too big for universities or insufficiently profitable to land backing as venture startups — think the Hubble Space Telescope or the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

Eric Schmidt, who was CEO of Google for a decade and later executive chairman, currently has an estimated net worth of $25 billion. In recent years, Eric and Wendy Schmidt have been focusing on their philanthropy, with a particular concentration on large-scale research and technology that spans scientific disciplines and geographies — an orientation that Renaissance shares. Schmidt Sciences, their dedicated science philanthropy arm, launched early this year, with focus areas including AI and advanced computing, astrophysics and space, biosciences, climate and other efforts to accelerate research. Meanwhile, their Schmidt Ocean Institute enables exploration of ocean science, notably with a state-of-the-art research vessel called R/V Falkor (too).

Renaissance Philanthropy appears designed to continue the Schmidts' network-building approach to science funding. Going forward, it seems likely that they will continue to fund more new organizations, like Convergent and Renaissance, to boost science philanthropy’s capacity to back new directions in research and development.

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