TL;DR: AIM is running its first incubation round focused exclusively on animal welfare, in partnership with Aaron Boddy (co-founder of Shrimp Welfare Project). It'll run in early 2027, and we’re on the hunt for all-star future founders — especially the ones who care about animal welfare but have been quietly assuming they're a bad fit for the cause.
Want to learn more about founding? Drop into our office hours at EAG London this Saturday, 12–1pm (find it on Swapcard), or fill out our expression of interest form.
Want to be a part of our research effort for this round? Contact our Research Director Morgan with your CV/LinkedIn and why you're interested.
Curious about what this means for our global health and development work? The short answer: nothing's changing[1].
A program built to incubate transformational animal charities
This is the best-resourced and most fit-for-purpose version of AIM's program we've run for animal founders. Our charity incubation program was built to accommodate a wide range of types of charities, and we’ve long hypothesized that running rounds with a tighter focus could enable an even higher hit-rate of field-leading charities.
By focusing this round entirely on animal welfare, we can tailor the research process, founder recruitment efforts, and program content and support to what animal charities specifically need, instead of what works on average across cause areas. The cohort itself will also be more valuable than in a mixed round: every founder will be working on adjacent problems and at a similar stage in their charity's journey, which makes for more useful peer support and network sharing, and a stronger sense of building momentum together.
Why now
1. The bottlenecks are easing. Until recently we were limited to incubating ~2–4 animal charities per year, held back mostly by volume of top talent and mid-stage funding. Both are loosening up. Our recent cohort saw a particularly high number of top applicants interested in founding animal charities, and major grantmakers have significantly more to deploy than they did a few years ago — the EA Animal Welfare Fund alone has had more funding allocated to it in the past six months than in the previous six years.
2. The intervention pipeline needs filling. The most cost-effective and evidence-based interventions in the field (like cage-free corporate campaigns) have been pursued hard already, and the "what comes next" pipeline is looking thin. This is striking given how little of the opportunity space has been explored compared to a cause like global health. The low-hanging fruit hasn't been picked because barely anyone's in the orchard: the movement is talent-constrained, and the people in it are mostly long-time insiders working from a shared playbook rather than outsiders bringing fresh eyes. We need to find the next ten things that could become what cage-free has been (or 10x bigger and better).
3. An exciting partnership. Aaron Boddy (co-founder of Shrimp Welfare Project) has been thinking independently about how to bring bolder, more ambitious animal charities into the world. So have we. Aaron has done what we're asking these founders to do: bring a fresh perspective to identify, test and scale a bold new intervention. Pairing that with AIM's incubation infrastructure and track record gives the charities in this round a better shot at achieving the kind of impact that changes what the movement thinks is possible.
You don't need to be an “animal person”
If you care about doing the most good but have been quietly assuming an animal-focused round isn't for you, please consider these common misconceptions:
You don't need to be vegan: Some of the most effective people in animal welfare aren't. Changing your personal consumer choices is one of many ways to help animals.
You don't need an animal-movement background: You don't need to know what the Open Wing Alliance or Prop 12 is or have read any of the canon. The charities that are likely to come out of this cohort aren't likely to look like activism or corporate campaigning – they'll be more likely to look like reshaping the incentives that industry responds to, bringing new technology to market, or influencing rulemakers. Business, consulting, science, policy and operational skills are as useful as years inside the movement, often more so. One of our recent animal founders told us he didn't know what The Humane League was until he’d already founded. That’s fine!
You don't need to feel a strong emotional pull toward animals: Plenty of people working in this space, including founders of some of the field's most successful animal charities, buy the moral case for fixing factory farming intellectually without feeling much when they see a chicken[2]. That being said, if your sense of the case is "yeah, I guess, on paper" rather than "this is by far one of the most important issues in the world" then it’s probably not a good fit.
This doesn’t have to fit into your current career narrative: Some of the founders we're most excited about only started taking animal welfare seriously in the last year or two, after coming across the numbers and finding they couldn't unsee them. We welcome newcomers to the issue just as much as those who have been animal-pilled for a decade.
The one thing you do need: The conviction that this matters and the appetite to do something about it.
Why coming to this fresh is genuinely useful
The animal movement is small and tight-knit, which is one of its strengths, but it also means the field tends to converge on a relatively small set of shared playbooks. Most people working in animal welfare have been working in animal welfare for a long time, and the ideas that get pursued tend to be the ones that look reasonable from inside that tradition. That's part of why so many enormous, tractable problems remain almost untouched. Shrimp Welfare Project succeeded partly because its founders were willing to take seriously a population most advocates hadn’t.
Outsiders bring things this field is short on: fresh eyes to spot new solutions, and skill sets the movement is light on (e.g. the kind of person who can bring new technology to market, influence policy, speak the language of big corporations and sell them on changes they didn't know they wanted, or design a rigorous field study).
To be clear: being an “outsider" to the animal movement doesn’t mean being dismissive of it. The founders we want take the existing movement seriously and learn its hard-won knowledge quickly.
What we're looking to incubate
AIM has incubated field-leading farmed animal charities before, including two ACE-recommended ones, but in this round we're less interested in inching the current trajectory of the animal movement forward, and more interested in charities that could shift what the movement thinks is possible. Shrimp Welfare Project is a good example of this case: it got the movement to pay attention to an overlooked population and found tractable ways to help them by the billion by being open to things that many animal advocates would never consider.
Recent changes to the funding landscape influence which charity ideas are more promising to incubate right now: The potential of charities to scale (larger and faster) is more valuable than it was. Established animal funders have recently increased the amount of money they have to deploy each year. Meanwhile new funders are emerging. Movement leaders are calling for existing actors to increase their capacity to deploy funding effectively, and for new organizations to be founded so we have a strong pipeline of organizations that can put more funding to work in the near future.
Want to learn more about founding?
- EAG London this Saturday, 12–1pm: Office hours with Aaron and the AIM team. Drop in to ask questions, kick ideas around, or just say hi. Find it on Swapcard.
- Expression of interest form: Even if you're not sure you'd apply, filling it out keeps you in the loop and helps us understand who's out there.
Want to be a part of our research effort for this round?
Contact our Research Director Morgan with your CV/LinkedIn and why you're interested.
LLM use disclaimer: Claude helped with copywriting and copyediting of this post. It has been carefully edited and rewritten so that it faithfully reflects our views.
- ^
We're as excited about global health and development (GHD) as ever, and will be incubating GHD charities in our H2 2027 cohort. We aim to make this a particularly large cohort so we’re still incubating as many GHD charities as possible in 2027 (and our plan is to scale this further to found more GHD charities than ever in 2028). If you want to found a GHD charity, you can apply when we next open applications.
- ^
Although often the feelings catch up with the intellectual arguments over time. See here the story of how Andrés learned to feel for shrimp.