Our 2017 fundraiser is complete! We’ve had an incredible month, with, by far, our largest fundraiser success to date. More than 300 distinct donors gave just over $2.5M, doubling our third fundraising target of $1.25M. Thank you!

Target 1

$625,000

Completed Target 2

$850,000

Completed Target 3

$1,250,000

Completed $2,504,625 raised in total! 358 donors contributed × Target Descriptions Target 1

Target 2

Target 3 $625k: Basic target At this funding level, we’ll be in a good position to pursue our mainline hiring goal in 2018, although we will likely need to halt or slow our growth in 2019. $850k: Mainline-growth target At this level, we’ll be on track to fully fund our planned expansion over the next few years, allowing us to roughly double the number of research staff over the course of 2018 and 2019. $1.25M: Rapid-growth target At this funding level, we will be on track to maintain a 1.5-year runway even if our hiring proceeds a fair amount faster than our mainline prediction. We’ll also have greater freedom to pay higher salaries to top-tier candidates as needed.

Our largest donation came toward the very end of the fundraiser in the form of an Ethereum donation worth $763,970 from Vitalik Buterin, the inventor and co-founder of Ethereum. Vitalik’s donation represents the third-largest single contribution we’ve received to date, after a $1.25M grant disbursement from the Open Philanthropy Project in October, and a $1.01M Ethereum donation in May.

In our mid-fundraiser update, we noted that MIRI was included in a large Matching Challenge: In partnership with Raising For Effective Giving, professional poker players Dan Smith, Tom Crowley and Martin Crowley announced they would match all donations to MIRI and nine other organizations through the end of December. Donors helped get us to our matching cap of $300k within 2 weeks, resulting in a $300k match from Dan, Tom, and Martin (thanks guys!). Other big winners from the Matching Challenge, which raised $4.5m (match included) in less than 3 weeks, include GiveDirectly ($588k donated) and the Good Food Institute ($416k donated).

Other big donations we received in December included:

$367,575 from Christian Calderon

$100,000 from the Berkeley Existential Risk Institute

$59,251 from Marius van Voorden

We also received substantial support from medium-sized donors: a total of $631,595 from the 42 donors who gave $5,000–$50,000 and a total of $113,556 from the 75 who gave $500–$5,000 (graph). We also are grateful to donors who leveraged their employers’ matching generosity, donating a combined amount of over $100,000 during December.

66% of funds donated during this fundraiser were in the form of cryptocurrency (mainly Bitcoin and Ethereum), including Vitalik, Marius, and Christian’s donations, along with Dan, Tom, and Martin’s matching contributions.

Overall, we’ve had an amazingly successful month and a remarkable year! I’m extremely grateful for all the support we’ve received, and excited about the opportunity this creates for us to grow our research team more quickly. For details on our growth plans, see our fundraiser post.