Announcing Trace

When researching recent projects—impact markets, FundingBench, and AI Safety Funder Bulletin—we kept coming across similar questions that were a bit of a pain to answer. How much money had someone raised, and when? What kind of things was someone funding?

So we decided to put together as comprehensive a database of funding as we could.

Right now Trace is tracking $2.8 billion of AI safety funding, over 4500 grants, over 700 funders, and over 1800 recipients, going back to 2003.

There are many similar lists out there:

• grantmaking.ai
• Longterm Wiki
• Donations List
• OpenBook
• EA Grants Database

But ultimately none of these was as comprehensive as we wanted, so we made our own. Our initial motivation was to make something that would be helpful for us, but hopefully others will find it helpful too. Because we think guesses are more helpful than nothing, we’ve included rough estimates for numbers that aren’t publicly reported, marking them as estimates.

You can search an organization to see its grants:

look at grants by funder:

or break down funding by cause area:

On the about page, you can see the sources we use and when they were last updated—we have automated processes scraping most of them regularly. Trace is focused on AI safety for now. It includes lots of grants in e.g. animal welfare, since we got those for free by pulling from Coefficient Giving and EA Funds, but we haven’t aimed to be comprehensive in tracking animal welfare or other grants.

In the future, we’d like to add more info about organizations—descriptions, team, others’ comments and endorsements—as well as expanding what we cover and finding more grants.

So:

• Check out trace.manifund.org if you want!
  • Use our website, API, MCP, or download all our grants.
• If you see something missing or wrong, correct the record.
  • https://trace.manifund.org/edit
• Or contact us at [email protected] to add more data.
  • If you have grant data to share but don’t want to go to the trouble of formatting it nicely or posting it somewhere, feel free to send it to us in any form and we’ll add it to Trace!