For the last few years at Karma, we've been working on a specific set of problems in web3 funding.
How do you give funders real visibility into where their money goes? How do you measure the impact of grants once they're deployed? How do you efficiently match causes with the people who want to fund them?
The deeper we got into these questions, the clearer it became that they aren't web3 problems. They're funding problems. The same questions are wide open in the much larger philanthropic sector, just at a scale that dwarfs anything happening in crypto.
Traditional philanthropy does have one signal that doesn't exist in web3: IRS 990 filings.
Every foundation and nonprofit in US has to file one. They contain a remarkable level of detail about who funded who, how much, in what year, for what cause. Decades of data, hundreds of billions of dollars of giving. All public.
The catch is that it's painful to access it. The data is locked inside PDFs. The search tools are paid, fragmented, and surface level. To answer something as basic as "how has the Packard Foundation's giving evolved over the last 3 years and where did the money actually go" you'd spend hours stitching together filings by hand.
We needed this for our own research, so we built a tool that indexes every 990 filed in last 10 years (which is millions of filings) and lets you ask questions in plain English.
A few things you can ask:
• How much did the Packard Foundation give in the last 3 years, and to whom?
• Find foundations that have funded youth literacy programs in the Midwest under $500K
• Who has funded nonprofits like ours recently?
You get back actual grant data. Amounts, recipients, patterns, trends. Real evidence of who funds what.
It turns out this is exactly what nonprofit fundraisers and grant writers spend most of their week doing manually. So we cleaned it up and made it public.
One more thing we're proud of: you don't have to come to our website at all. Connect the tool to ChatGPT or Claude through MCP and do your prospect research inside the tools you already use every day.
This is the start of Karma working on funding beyond web3. The problems we care about exist everywhere, and we want to work on them everywhere.
Free to try: