Grants fund programs, but ownership funds the future. That’s the hard truth many social-impact founders face in 2026. While traditional philanthropy eagerly consumes research and celebrates innovation from stages, it often hesitates to write the check for the very infrastructure that could transform the sector. Meanwhile, private capital moves fast—but it demands a massive exit, often sidelining the mission. This article explores why ownership is the key to mission fidelity, how founders are building a third path through community investment, and what philanthropy can do right now to back the tools that will shape the next two decades.
Two Capital Systems That Fail Mission Founders
Social-impact tech founders are currently trapped between two unworkable systems.
Venture capital is not a neutral tool. When you take venture dollars, you sign a contract that demands one outcome: a massive exit, usually within seven to ten years. If you miss, you get replaced. Every piece of social-sector software you’ve ever used—Instrumentl, Fluxx, Submittable, Bonterra, Classy, Daffy—is bound by this agreement. The people and organizations those tools serve don’t factor into the exit calculation. The mission becomes secondary to the return.
Traditional philanthropy exists to counterbalance this dynamic. In theory, it pours resources into underestimated organizations. In practice, it funds programs, not infrastructure. It stays a decade behind trends and rarely bets on newcomers. Most foundations treat the word “startup” as a reason to pause, study, convene, and ultimately pass.
What does philanthropy leave on the table? Ownership. And ownership is where mission fidelity lives. In the AI era, when building costs have collapsed but capital still flows primarily through venture, who owns the social-impact tech stack determines who gets to decide what it’s for—and who it ultimately serves. That is the highest-leverage question philanthropy could engage right now. But it chooses not to.
What the Private Sector Already Knows
Justin Steele spent nearly a decade at Google.org, deploying $690 million toward social impact. When he started building Kindora—an AI-powered platform that gives nonprofits funder intelligence and grant matching tools—he was inundated with calls. But not from philanthropy.
Within the first week of incorporating his Public Benefit Corporation, a venture-backed company offered to buy his IP outright. Three weeks later, a private equity firm arranged meetings with its VP of Product and VP of Engineering. “The private sector was 100% on top of this,” Justin told me. “Anything interesting and potentially valuable getting built with AI—private capital is all over it.”
Philanthropy, meanwhile, was still studying it. Inviting Justin to give hour-long talks at board meetings. “There’s a loneliness to it,” he said. “They mean it when they say they love what we’re building. And the check still doesn’t come.”
Justin has funded Kindora out of his own savings—more than $200,000—to build something that foundations with billions in endowments have been too risk-averse to back. The irony isn’t lost on him. The same private capital moving fast on AI is moving because the window is open now. Philanthropy’s slower clock means that by the time foundations decide tools like Kindora are worth backing, the chance to shape who builds them—and for whom—may have already passed.
The Third Path: Community Ownership
Some founders are not waiting for philanthropy to catch up. They are building a third option, making a radical argument: the community a company serves should be able to own a piece of it.
The precedent is BlocPower, the Black-founded public benefit corporation that built clean energy infrastructure in underserved communities. Founder Donnel Baird blended recoverable grants, foundation capital, and multiple community investment rounds on Wefunder. The people who benefited from the infrastructure could also own a piece of it. BlocPower is now valued at over $1 billion.
Now, Kindora is attempting something similar. This summer, Justin is exploring a community investment round through Wefunder—a regulated crowdfunding platform that is itself a public benefit corporation. The goal: let the nonprofits and social-sector organizations that use Kindora every day own a piece of the infrastructure they depend on. The design is intentional: broad community ownership, no venture control terms, no growth-at-all-costs mandate.
There is also a pathway for foundations and donor-advised fund holders to participate philanthropically—not as a straightforward grant, but as a capital investment that funds ownership, with any upside recycling back to charitable purposes.
How Foundations Can Act Now
The instruments to fund mission-aligned PBCs already exist:
- Program-Related Investments (PRIs)
- Recoverable grants
- Mission-Related Investments (MRIs)
Organizations like Realize Impact make it easier. For funders who want a concrete first step: ask your program team whether you have a PRI policy, and whether it covers social-sector technology infrastructure. If the answer is no, that’s the gap worth closing.
Why This Matters Beyond Kindora
Kindora’s product works. Over 1,000 nonprofit organizations use it today. The platform identifies more than 100,000 open grant opportunities across the U.S. and Europe every week, matching organizations to funders based on three years of actual grant history. Critically, it also identifies who isn’t a fit—redirecting a nonprofit’s limited bandwidth toward genuinely worthwhile opportunities and freeing up program officers from mismatched applications.
But the Kindora story is a proxy to the real question: what happens to all of the infrastructure being built right now, in this 1998-internet moment for the AI application layer?
The tools being built today will define how civil society operates for the next two decades. Some are being built by founders who are proximate to their communities, values-aligned, and deliberately avoiding extractive capital structures. Those founders need startup capital—not to build a billion-dollar unicorn, but to hire the right people, sustain the best ideas, and build something durable without sacrificing integrity.
Philanthropists have it in their power to lower the drawbridge and fund the people building the infrastructure that will determine whether the AI era concentrates power further, or finally starts to share it.
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