Supporting dynamic solutions through innovation and entrepreneurship

Photo Credit: Reefgen
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.
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.

Fostering Innovation to Tackle Miami-Dade’s Most Pressing Challenges

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.

Encouraging Market-Shaping Approaches to Global Problems

Griffin Catalyst and Schmidt Futures have partnered with the University of Chicago to launch a first-of-its-kind market accelerator program to surface and support the next great market-shaping solutions, while teaching policymakers to use these techniques to address complex challenges.

Improving Organ Donation to Save Thousands of Lives

Innovation and entrepreneurship drive change when confronting long-standing, 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coalition with bipartisan support, enabled the leveraging of data to achieve breakthroughs in overhauling America’s outdated and inefficient organ donation system.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

June 17, 2025
How did the end of the Age of Dinosaurs in Africa impact world history? That’s what researchers aim to uncover during a five-year project of excavation and analysis in the Northern Cape region of South Africa. Their study will explore fossil ecosystems and the biodiversity of sub-Saharan Africa during the Late Cretaceous Period to dramatically expand scientists’ currently limited understanding of this important epoch.
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.
October 28, 2024
Griffin Catalyst provided a seed gift of $2.5 million to accelerate the efforts of Feng Zhang, a faculty member at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, to develop “programmable therapeutics,” an approach that holds promise for revolutionizing medicine by reprogramming cells to cure a wide range of human diseases.
April 17, 2025
Griffin Catalyst is proud to partner with the nonprofit American History Unbound. The collaboration will present dramatic multimedia storytelling about World War I and World War II to audiences in New York and Miami, and nationwide through a documentary being filmed for broadcast on public television later this year, to coincide with Veterans Day. The unique combination of narration and imagery from renowned historian John Monsky, accompanied by music from Broadway stars and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, brings to life in new ways two of the most pivotal events in the 20th century.
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.
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

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