$1 billion bet by Jed McCaleb and Dr. Seemay Chou on AI and open science: Navigation Fund’s radical model aims to redefine large-scale philanthropy

Less than two years ago, a new philanthropic powerhouse, the Navigation Fund, was launched with an endowment worth around $1 billion.

The driving force behind it is Jed McCaleb, a 50-year-old multibillionaire tech entrepreneur who made his fortune creating some of the earliest and most influential cryptocurrency ventures, including Ripple and Stellar.

His collaborator and close partner in the philanthropic and scientific domains, Dr. Seemay Chou, a biologist and co-founder of the life sciences company Arcadia Science, chairs the fund’s board.

Together, they represent a “crypto-science” couple now stepping into large-scale philanthropy.

The fund has already spent about $500 million to buy 24,000 advanced computer chips (NVIDIA H100s). These chips, vital for training artificial intelligence systems, are housed in six U.S. data centers.

Rather than sitting idle, the fund operates them through a subsidiary called Voltage Park, which rents out computing power to researchers and startups at far lower prices than big cloud providers like Amazon.

The revenues from these rentals flow back into the charity, creating a cycle where business income directly supports philanthropy.

In the near future, the Navigation Fund plans to direct tens of millions of dollars into cutting-edge causes.

One headline focus is “digital sentience”—research into whether artificial intelligence could one day become conscious.

It also supports projects in open science, offering grants of up to $500,000 to make scientific research more accessible and transparent.

What makes this fund unusual is its model: instead of relying only on invested endowment returns, it owns an operating business that generates money for charitable work.

If successful, McCaleb and Chou’s experiment could signal a new direction in how today’s ultra-wealthy donors approach philanthropy—blending large-scale tech assets with bold, high-risk scientific and social investments.

Stay tuned!