Our mission is to improve lifetime earnings through access to opportunities.
We believe that philanthropy’s best use is as risk capital to drive impact.
Our Approach
Funding should move at the pace of the world around us, backing innovations that drive benefits for all, instead of sitting on the sidelines as the world accelerates.
For GitLab Foundation, that means uncovering what works to secure and improve incomes.
Uncertainty can paralyze decision-making, so we’ve built tools and methods that help us act quickly and with confidence. Our predictive modeling practice estimates a program’s likely income returns before we commit funding. Macroeconomic and political analysis helps ups anticipate where labor markets are heading and who stands to gain or lose. And we work alongside our grantees to build their evidence and measure their impact. So every investment sharpens the next decision.
The way we work produces real, measurable results.
Our proprietary dataset of 300+ ROI models lets us compare potential impact across causes, geographies and intervention types. We’ve built an engine that can drive more scale and speed in philanthropic giving and which has allowed us to fund interventions delivering more than 100x returns on our social investment.
Today we are expanding what that means.
Our work goes beyond grantmaking and includes building the infrastructure that helps donors everywhere give with the same confidence, speed and rigor. That means changing practices across the field and continuing to put capital to work in ways that prove what’s possible through collaboration and strategic investment.
Our Work
How we do it
What does it take to move capital as fast as the world it's trying to change?
What would it look like if every donor could give with confidence?
Our work spans four areas. Together, these let us deploy our own capital and support other donors and foundations who wish to move with speed, an experimental mindset, and the desire for outsized returns:
Collaborative Funds and Initiatives: We design and manage capital structures, including collaborative funds and single-donor initiatives, that give charitable funders fast, credible ways to move capital to high-impact work.
Impact Advisory Services: We help individual donors, family offices, and foundations with strategic support and capacity-building on key metrics establishment, pre-investment social return on investment modeling, impact measurement, dashboarding, AI adoption, and portfolio strategy - across economic mobility, and beyond.
Tools and Technical Products: We support the nonprofit sector through the development of dashboards, playbooks, and technical products - many that we will release as public goods.
White-Label Grantmaking: For donor collectives, family offices, and individuals who want the rigor of a sophisticated foundation, we offer turnkey grantmaking operations — including strategy articulation, grantmaking due diligence, grants management, and reporting.
Our Values
We bring our work to life through our core values of collaboration, results, efficiency, diversity, iteration, and transparency.
We prioritize partnership, measurement, continuously learning, and sharing our progress with others.
