Summary: Mox is fundraising to maintain and grow AIS projects, build a compelling membership, and foster other impactful and delightful work. We're looking to raise $450k for 2026, and you can donate on Manifund!

Overview

Who we are

Mox is SF’s largest AI safety coworking space, and also its primary Effective Altruism community space. We opened just over a year ago, and over the last year, we’ve served high-impact work in and around AI safety by hosting conferences, fellowships, events, and incubating new organizations.

Our theory of change is to provide good infrastructure (offices, event space) and a high density of collegial interactions to people and projects we admire. We're not focusing on a single specific thesis on AI safety. Instead, we aim to support many sorts of people and organizations who: 

1. agree that transformative AI is on the horizon,
2. have a strong thesis about what it means for the world to go well,
3. are working on a project that we think credibly advances their thesis.

This includes many projects that are directly AI Safety, such as Seldon Lab, the broader Effective Altruist sphere such as Sentient Futures, and even more broadly non-EA projects by EAs or from EA and rationalist-friendly corners of the SF tech scene, such as Arbor Trading Bootcamp (pictured below). Many more examples of such work are are given in the "Current Operations" heading.

Our team also works really hard to make Mox a fun and cozy place to be! We want to be a comfortable place for people to gather. Good communities grow in good spaces.

After an event-filled first year that included a visit from AI safety bill sponsor Senator Scott Weiner, we wrapped up with the 200-person Sentient Futures Summit, and are now looking forward to a second year building on the successes of the first! 

Why we're raising

We think our highest impact is still in the future, building upon the strength of the ops team we've built in the first year, and we’re looking for private and organizational funding to carry us through the next year, for the purposes described below. We operate at a metered loss, since our mission is to support and develop a community, rather than to maximize profit.

Since we're a large venue of 40,000 sqft [3,700 meters squared!], with a capacity of 300+ desks, our operating costs are relatively high. On the other hand, we have lots of room to grow within the space! Our mainline ask is $450k, and we think we can successfully deploy funding up to 1.2 million dollars to run more great events, improve our space, and incubate new fellowships.

How to donate

To donate, find us on Manifund, or contact me directly:
Rachel Shu, Mox Director rachel@moxsf.com

Funding milestones

⬜ Raise $100k by March 15th (will be 1:1 matched!)

To kick off, an anonymous donor has offered us 1:1 donation matching up to $100k. We’d like to hit at least this goal! If we can get this, we’ll be able to extend our runway (which is only a few months long), and be able to commit to future operations.

How you can help out:

• Make a free-and-clear donation via Manifund, even any small amount helps with the matching.
• Consider sponsoring our community and our events in the following ways: Mox Sponsor Opportunities

⬜ Raise $450k by April 1st

This is the amount we need to meet our expected operational demand over the next 6 months, and we are hoping to raise it from individual donors who can donate quickly. Our anticipated monthly burn is only $30k more than our revenue, but we also are looking to build a cash reserve for unforeseen circumstances.

With our minimum operating budget for the year secured and reserves in the bank, we’ll be able to:

• Continue ongoing operations, with buffer against unexpected circumstances. ($200k)
• Expand our headcount by 1-2 more staff to improve and expand existing events and coworking operations. (up to $250k.)
• Run regular high-frequency, high-profile talk series (included in staff cost.)
• Guarantee our Global Expert Fellowship, which is a J-1 visa program designed to bring in international AI safety experts (included in staff cost.)

⬜ Raise $1.2m by June 1st

This will probably include grants made by our organizational funders. This is the median funding that we think we can deploy meaningfully this year. With generous funding, some of our ambitions would include:

• Restructure our interior space to meet member needs, such as adding phone booths and nooks, and improve our interior design. ($400k, mainly construction costs.)
• Initiate our own fellowship programs, such as the Muybridge fellowship suggested below. ($300-$500k.)
• Sponsor highly-aligned organizations and individuals at Mox who we think are doing excellent work and need the subsidy, effectively serving as regrantors. ($150k.)

Funding updates

Raised $550k in 2025

In our initial fundraising post a year ago, we proposed three budget tiers — minimal ($1.6M/year), mainline (~$2M), and ambitious ($3.6M). As a then-unproven organization, we did not meet any of our funding goals, raising in total $550k.

Delivered above expectations

What we spent annualized to roughly $1.2M, less than even our ‘minimal’ tier projection. What we delivered landed closer to ‘mainline’: 183 members, 144 Guest Program participants, 15 offices, a team of 5, and 2 tentpole events most months. And from the ‘ambitious’ tier, we succeeded at expanding Mox to all four floors of 1680 Mission. We’ve done this by keeping our team small, finding good deals on rent and furnishings, and charging fair prices to external clients.

Present state of finances

Monthly revenue and expenses spreadsheet: May 2025 - Jan 2026

Revenue: ~$100k/mo

Our ~$100k/mo revenue comes from a mix of paid memberships, private offices, and external fellowships. 

Conversely, most of our events are provided for free or at a low sponsorship cost, with occasional revenue-generating events such as hackathons and happy hours. 

Expenses: ~$130k/mo

Our ~$130k/mo expenses are mainly staff labor and building costs, each composing about 35-40% of our total expenses in a typical month. 

The remainder goes to providing amenities, servicing events, and investing in capital improvements such as improving our interior design.

Sustainable by EOY

Right now, we are in a funding crunch, and have only cash reserves equivalent to a few months of runway.

We believe we're on track to self-sustainability this year, projecting monthly revenue to continue growing by $10-15k/mo for the next 3-6 months. Our main projected growth is currently in memberships and private offices, with events and fellowships remaining steady. 

As our growth tails off, we think our steady state expenses will be ~$160k/month, and we’ll be revenue neutral on expenses and even slightly positive on balance.

Will still seek funding in future years

We anticipate that capital improvements will always come out of endowments, so we plan to continue raising every year.

Current operations

Fellowships & programs

We supported five residencies in the last year:

• FLF Fellowship on AI for Human Reasoning: 30 fellows exploring, researching, and developing potential beneficial AI for Human Reasoning tools.
• PIBBSS Fellowship 2025 (now Principles of Intelligence): 17 fellows in residence for cross-disciplinary AI safety research.
• Seldon Lab Accelerator, Batch 1: 4 startups building AI safety infrastructure, including Andon Labs, Workshop Labs, and Lucid Computing.
• Seldon Lab Accelerator, Batch 2: 6 startups, currently in residence.
• The Frame Fellowship: An 8-week program for 12 video creators communicating about AI safety, developed in-house at Mox.

How does Mox contribute to these programs’ success?

• Provide a fully furnished office
• Situate them alongside other groups doing similar work
• Provide event venue space directly connected to their workspace
• Handle daily catering, janitorial and supplies
• Troubleshoot participant tech
• Host pre/post conference coworking and social gatherings for various workshops and conferences, including: EAGxBay Area, LessOnline, Manifest, and The Curve, with 500+ total attendees across those days

Public events

We hosted 377 events over the last year, including:

• Senator Scott Wiener on AI safety legislation — live Q&A with CA Senator and author of SB-53.
• Sentient Futures Summit — a 350+ attendee, 3-day conference in February 2026 focused on AI and Animal Welfare, as featured in the SF Standard.
• Models in Moral Mazes — Anthropic research scholars previewed an unpublished paper on misalignment at Mox before public release.
• Man vs Machine Hackathon (METR × Factory.AI) — a 300 person, live RCT on AI coding agent productivity, with participants from both safety and industry.
• Q&As and fireside chats with Joe Carlsmith, Eli Lifland, Nate Soares, Scott Aaronson, Joel Becker and Bryan Caplan.

Mox also hosts community events, such as:

• Effective Altruism SF, biweekly events and meetups
• Astral Codex Ten SF, monthly meetups
• 90/30 Club, machine learning paper reading group
• Mathematics with Lean, a group dedicated to self-guided explorations of the Lean interactive theorem prover

“Mox has been an invaluable resource for us when running EA SF [Effective Altruism San Francisco], since its large and well-equipped facility allowed us to cater food, run speaker events, workshops, and otherwise host much larger and more ambitious events than we otherwise would have been able to.” — G., a lead organizer of EA SF

Individuals & coworking

You can see a list of all our members here: https://moxsf.com/people

We currently have 183 active members; on a typical coworking day, 50-80 people are at Mox. A sampling of individual members who are frequently at Mox:

• Kamile Lukosuite, Safety researcher, GovAI
• Itsi Weinstock, Senterra Funders
• Ross Rheingans-Yoo, Development and Research podcast
• Emma Kumleben, IFP contributor, Future of Life fellow
• Justin Kuiper, AI safety video producer
• Joshua Levy, knowledge tools, Holloway

Member testimonials!

“It feels like a second home, but more lively. I can always expect to run into a friend who is down to cowork or hang.” — Constance Li, founder of Sentient Futures

“I can walk up to anyone and have an interesting conversation; every single person I've met here has welcomed questions about their work and been curious about mine.” — Gavriel Kleinwaks, Horizon Fellow

“Mox has the best density of people with the values & capabilities I care about the most. In general, it's more social & feels better organized for serendipity vs any coworking space I've been to before, comparable to perhaps like 0.3 Manifests per month.” — Venki Kumar

Sourced from our August feedback survey.

Private offices and partner organizations

In Year 1, Mox was home to 15 private offices, including:

• Sentient Futures: promoting animal welfare and sentience research
• Tampersec: building physical computing infrastructure security
• Andon Labs: building autonomous organizations such as Project Vend, via Seldon accelerator
• Pantograph: building a preschool for robots
• BlueDot Impact (pending visa): online courses for AI safety upskilling

We also maintain a Guest Program with 19 partner organizations to give their teams free drop-in access.

Public program partners include: MIRI, FAR.AI, Redwood Research, BlueDot Impact, Palisade, GovAI, EPOCH, AI Impacts, Timaeus, Elicit, Evitable, and MATS.

“Our teammates visit San Francisco a couple of times a month. Instead of renting a coworking spot, Mox gives us a familiar space with friendly faces that we reliably run into. It feels closer to going to the college library with friends than to an office. We hang out there for many hours after our work is done!” — Deger Turan, CEO of Metaculus

Upcoming plans

Grow and improve our main offerings

Events

• More major conferences like Sentient Futures Summit
• More public talks with key speakers like Senator Weiner
• Improve our first floor and make it highly usable and more publicly accessible, building our ability to provide a good space, which mostly shows up in the impact we have, and somewhat in revenue.

Programs

• Serve repeat cohorts of the fellowship programs that have used our space so far
• Additionally serve 3-7 new fellowships and workshops in this coming year

Coworking

• Continue growing our community of individual members to 120-150 daily users, 300+ total members
• Maintain the ability to select private offices based on fit, rather than market rate
• Create additional meeting rooms and other communal areas in the coworking space

Build an SF hub for animal welfare

Perhaps to some people's surprise, there isn't one yet, in the same way that surprisingly, no SF hub for AI safety existed until Mox came about. Mox can be that hub! 

Sentient Futures has found our space ideal for providing Pro-Animal Coworking days, AIxAnimals mixers, and Revolutionists Night lectures, bringing together much of the animal welfare scene in San Francisco. What is still needed is more animal welfare organizations to come onboard to create a dedicated shared section of our coworking space. Ultimately, we hope to replicate for animal welfare what we've done to coalesce the spread-out AIS community in SF!

Attract international talent via Global Expert Fellowship

A key part of our second-year vision is the Global Expert Fellowship: hosting independent researchers, domain specialists, and builders through J-1 visa programs to create new frontier technology collaborations within the Mox community and internationally.

We think this is the highest-impact thing we can achieve this year. It has immediate external impact by enabling independent researchers to quickly enter the US to do work, and it strengthens Mox by expanding our network of high-quality talent. Mox is in a rare position to pull this off, as we are able to meet State Department requirements for visa-qualifying cultural exchange which many other organizations cannot.

Incubate new workshops and programs

We have an advantage in creating our own programs, sourcing from the talent pool we're developing.

Upcoming example: the Muybridge Fellowship for Visual Interpretability, which would bring together technical visual and interactive pioneers to improve the presentation of mechanistic interpretability research and broaden its accessibility. This builds on the experience gained running the existing Frame Fellowship.

To donate, find us on Manifund, or contact me directly:
Rachel Shu, Mox Director rachel@moxsf.com