Supporting dynamic solutions through innovation and entrepreneurship

Researchers lowering a Reefgen device into the sea from a boat
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coalition with bipartisan support, enabled the leveraging of data to achieve breakthroughs in overhauling America’s outdated and inefficient organ donation system.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 10, 2026
Griffin Catalyst is supporting scientific innovation through a novel approach known as Focused Research Organizations (FROs). These initiatives take on high-risk, high-potential challenges in science that academic research groups and for-profit companies aren’t well-suited to solving—with a well-defined goal and a time-limited opportunity to make progress. Griffin’s $20 million in support of this model has helped propel two initial FROs—Parallel Squared Technology Institute and Forest Neurotech—to advance work with the potential to address a range of neurological and age-related diseases. Inspired in part by the promise of this approach, the National Science Foundation recently announced a new Tech Labs Initiative,
May 31, 2024
Launched in 2023, the Miami-Dade Innovation Authority leverages the power of competition and innovation to support tech start-ups, scale solutions to local problems, and improve lives. In less than three years, the Authority has taken on challenges as diverse as beach ecology, highway traffic, cargo transportation, waste disposal, airport passenger experience, and, most recently, access to affordable housing and emergency response.
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
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

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