The Navigation Fund

The Navigation Fund (legally the Navigation Charitable Fund) is a 501(c)(3) public charity based in Berkeley, California, co-founded by Seemay Chou and David Coman-Hidy with an initial gift from Jed McCaleb, co-founder of Ripple and Stellar and one of the early figures in cryptocurrency. The fund was granted tax-exempt status in March 2023 and publicly launched in November 2023. The fund's core philosophy is that practitioners working on urgent problems know best how to solve them, and that the role of a funder is to provide flexible, long-term capital while getting out of the way. Program officers are hired from the fields they fund rather than from professional philanthropy, and they hold unusually high decision-making authority. The fund publicly shares its strategies and failures in the interest of transparency and sector learning. The Navigation Fund holds a $1.3 billion endowment, of which roughly 75% is held as ownership in Voltage Park, a for-profit AI cloud computing company that McCaleb funded by purchasing approximately $500 million of NVIDIA GPUs in 2023. Investment returns and asset appreciation fund the grantmaking program. Grantmaking has grown rapidly: $4 million to 36 recipients in 2023, $37 million to 115 recipients in 2024, and $64 million to 217 recipients in 2025. Current focus areas include climate change, farm animal welfare, transforming criminal justice, and open science. Nuclear safety is supported through a partnership with Longview Philanthropy. An early focus area called Safe AI or digital sentience (covering AI consciousness, moral status, and welfare) was announced at launch with approximately $20 million earmarked annually, but this area has a lower profile on the current website. The fund's president, David Coman-Hidy, previously led The Humane League. Board chair Seemay Chou is CEO of Arcadia Science. The fund uses invitation-only grant cycles and encourages potential grantees to submit introduction forms through their website. It also offers regranting services, donor advising, and pooled funds for other philanthropists.