Prior to becoming an independent organization in June 2017, the Open Philanthropy Project was operated as a partnership between Cari and Dustin's foundation, Good Ventures, and the charity evaluator GiveWell.
GiveWell was founded in 2007 by Elie Hassenfeld and Holden Karnofsky. They had stated aims to help people facing a similar situation to their own: interested in giving to charity, short on time for researching their options, and looking for highly evidence-backed charities to support.
Good Ventures was founded in 2011 by Cari Tuna and Dustin Moskovitz. Cari took the role of President, and spent her first year speaking with a range of people in search of advice.
The two organizations came to collaborate. The partnership adopted the Open Philanthropy Project name in 2014, and became an independent organization in 2017.
Timeline
Funded Companies
Impossible Foods is a plant-based meat company making meat and dairy products that are made to look and feel like animal products by manufacturing heme, the oxygen binding molecule found in blood, using engineered yeast grown in bioreactors.
Sherlock Biosciences is a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company founded in 2019 by David R. Walt, Rahul Dhanda, Feng Zhang, Jim Collins, Deborah Hung, Jonathan Gootenberg, Omar Abudayyeh, Pardis Sabeti and Todd Golub.