This past December, we ran our first fundraiser in six years, setting an ambitious goal of $6M. We ended up receiving a total of $1.8M from small donors and $1.6M in matching from the Survival and Flourishing Fund (SFF) for a total of $3.4M.
We’re incredibly grateful for all this support! In the rest of this post, I’ll go into more details on how the December fundraiser went, and the supporters who made this possible.
Before I do that, I also want to share some exciting updates. We’ve received two more incredibly generous donations: $10M from Dustin Moskovitz, and $2.9M from an anonymous donor. These donations combined with a successful fundraiser have put us in a very strong financial position for the next few years.
The donations we received in December already made this our largest fundraiser ever. Paired with this additional support, in total we’ve roughly tripled our reserves, which will allow us to be much more confident in making new hires and enacting ambitious plans.
2025 Fundraiser Retrospective
Going into this fundraiser, we were highly uncertain about how much support to expect. We hadn’t run a fundraiser since 2019. Since then, our strategy (and the world) has changed significantly.1
Given all of this uncertainty, the level of support we received was very encouraging!
Over the course of the fundraiser, we received $1,802,4372 in direct donations from individual supporters. Because we achieved our matching goal, matched donations will bring the total raised to $3,409,437, which is approximately 56% of the $6M fundraising goal we set. While we didn’t reach our topline target by the December 31 deadline, the net total raised represents the strongest fundraising outcome in MIRI’s history.
Early progress was slow, but momentum picked up substantially in the last few days of the year. Many donors rallied in the final stretch to help us close the gap and secure the full $1.6M match from the Survival and Flourishing Fund. Excluding matching funds:
- We received $514,853 before December 25.
- We received $1,287,584 on or after December 25 — including $582,427 on December 31st! Our donors love to keep things exciting! 😅
In total, we estimate that the fundraiser was supported by approximately 350 unique donors.3 Of these:
- 155 were returning donors, providing 62% of the funds raised.
- 195 were new donors, providing 38%.
Early 2026 Donations
Because we fell short of our $6M target, we expected to spend a lot of time on fundraising efforts during 2026, to ensure we maintained a healthy runway and could confidently execute on our plans. However, a donor reached out to us in January and generously offered $2.9M in support to complete our fundraiser goal. Shortly after, we also received an incredibly generous $10M donation from Dustin Moskovitz.
We’re thrilled to have received such strong support from many different donors, both large and small. We’d like to extend a huge thank-you to Dustin, to the anonymous donor, and also to the team at the Survival and Flourishing Fund for awarding the matching grant. SFF’s backing substantially amplified the impact of every contribution and provided a massive boost to our fundraiser.
Finally, we want to thank everyone who contributed to our fundraiser. We’re deeply appreciative for all of this support. Special thanks to the ~50 individuals who gave ~$5,000 or above, including (but not limited to):
Aaron Silverbook
Alexander Schell
Alyssa Riceman
Blake Borgeson
Clifford Hyra
Drake Morrison
Edwin Evans
Elliot Olds
Fergus Dall
Gordon Irlam
János Kramár
Lucius Bushnaq
Matthew Avant
Milan Scholz
Nathan Armishaw
Richard Schwall
Sebastian Hagen
Simon Sáfár
Footnotes
- Cryptocurrency markets were also down through much of Q4 2025. Historically, we’ve seen substantial support from crypto-linked donors during boom years, and this downturn may have reduced that channel of giving relative to past fundraisers.
- Our original count in January 2026 was just over 1.6M. We’ve since fully reconciled all pledged disbursements, checks mailed before December 31, employer matching, DAF grants, and some other sources that were received in Q1 2026 but applicable to December 2025 via accrual bookkeeping standards.
- Anonymous donors are aggregated as a single donor to simplify our recordkeeping.