Supporting dynamic solutions through innovation and entrepreneurship

The climate-tech start-up Reefgen has developed an unmanned, underwater robot to dramatically increase the rate of planting heat-resistant coral and seagrass meadows, in order to reverse the major worldwide losses of recent decades.
Photo Credit: Reefgen
Competition drives discovery and progress by incentivizing entrepreneurs to solve our most challenging problems. Griffin Catalyst supports organizations with innovative and scalable ideas to help people reach their full potential.

Our Impact Stories

Designing Technology for Environmental Resilience

It takes initiative and drive to build sustainable solutions to challenging problems. We harness that drive, supporting projects that can become viable businesses and improve people’s lives.

Our support has helped scale Good Machine, a venture studio finding ingenious new ways to apply technology to support environmental and climate resilience. With our support, Good Machine is replanting coral reefs—home to one quarter of all life in the ocean—up to 100 times faster than human divers, helping to ensure that these vital ecosystems can adapt and thrive.

Improving Organ Donation to Save Thousands of Lives

Innovation and entrepreneurship drive change when confronting longstanding, entrenched challenges. Griffin Catalyst works with partners to identify acute problems and advance novel solutions to improve people’s lives. 

Griffin Catalyst’s support for the Organs Initiative, a broad coalition with bipartisan support, enabled the leveraging of data to achieve breakthroughs in overhauling America’s outdated and inefficient organ donation system. These reforms are expected to save over 7,000 lives a year. 

Featured Partners

Our partner organizations are doing vital work in advancing enterprise and innovation. We’re proud to support them.

In Brief

April 22, 2023
A $20 million gift from Griffin Catalyst to Miami Dade College — which serves over 100,000 students — will establish the Griffin Scholarship Fund. This support, which represents the largest single gift in the history of Miami Dade College, will provide scholarships for more than 8,000 low-income students, most of them first-generation college-goers.
June 30, 2020
Griffin Catalyst has made the largest gift in the history of the Navy SEAL Foundation, to provide critical education, health care, and financial support to members of one of the U.S. military’s most elite special operations forces and their families.
September 8, 2023
In 2022, Griffin Catalyst joined with partners to support the Organs Initiative, a coalition leveraging data to drive change with broad bipartisan support. The challenge: To fix a broken, inefficient organ donation system that leads to tens of thousands of healthy organs going unrecovered each year and contributes to 30 Americans dying every day for lack of an available organ. In August 2022, the group achieved the first major overhaul of the organ donation system in 40 years, projected to save over 7,000 lives annually. Almost a year later, in July 2023, Congress unanimously passed legislation to break up
August 30, 2024
Since 2023, Griffin Catalyst has announced transformative gifts to three major health care institutions in Miami. Taken together, the support—totaling $125 million—represents an investment in the future of medical care and research in South Florida.
May 31, 2024
Launched in 2023, the Miami-Dade Innovation Authority leverages the power of competition and innovation to support start-ups, scale solutions to local problems, and improve lives.
May 23, 2024
To pay tribute to the nation's most distinguished military heroes—and to unite our country around the values their stories represent—Griffin Catalyst is supporting the National Medal of Honor Museum Foundation with a $30 million gift. The National Medal of Honor Griffin Institute is a key component of a three-pronged, $300 million effort that also includes a new museum in Arlington, Texas, and a new monument in Washington, D.C.
May 20, 2024
In December 2023, Griffin Catalyst and the David Geffen Foundation announced a gift of $400 million to New York's Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK), one of the most renowned and advanced cancer research and treatment institutions in the world. This landmark gift—the largest donation to the institution in its nearly 150-year history—will allow MSK to significantly expand and upgrade its research, educational, and treatment facilities toward a singular goal: eradicating cancer.
February 12, 2024
The Lincoln Memorial has long been one of America’s most visited monuments and the scene of some of the defining moments of the last century. In time for the 250th anniversary of the country, a new expansion project will transform a massive, long-hidden space beneath the Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall into an immersive museum, exhibition, and theater space, encouraging visitors to explore the story of one of America’s greatest presidents, Abraham Lincoln, and to learn about the nation’s progress toward becoming a more perfect union.
December 27, 2023
The success of Operation Warp Speed in 2020, which brought forth an effective COVID-19 vaccine in less than twelve months, was not only a scientific breakthrough but also a demonstration of the power of an approach called an advanced market commitment (AMC). By creating a demand so that pharmaceutical companies could invest in production prior to proving the efficacies of vaccines, this successful approach accelerated time to market and highlighted the opportunity for a class of similar “market-shaping tools” to accelerate progress. To expand this approach, Griffin Catalyst and Schmidt Futures have partnered with the University of Chicago to launch

News & Announcements