Krisztian Bocsi/Bloomberg; Guerin Blask for Forbes
Bill Gates and Charles Koch
Five of America’s top philanthropists are teaming up for a new venture aimed at helping low-income Americans rise from poverty. An AI giant has signed on to help.
It’s getting harder to climb the economic ladder in America. So five billionaires, who have all risen to great heights from different starting points, have banded together in an attempt to reverse the trend and to restore belief in the idea of the U.S. as a land of equal opportunity.
On Thursday, the charitable foundations of billionaires Bill Gates (net worth: $116.9 billion), Charles Koch ($67.5 billion), Steve Ballmer ($142.5 billion), Intuit founder Scott Cook ($7.7 billion) and hedge fund investor John Overdeck ($7.4 billion) announced a more than $1 billion pledge to fund a new philanthropic vehicle focused on economic mobility called NextLadder Ventures. That entity will partner with artificial intelligence giant Anthropic and will support organizations focused on using AI and other emerging technologies to improve the financial trajectory of low-income Americans.
“Entire communities are coming apart at the seams [and] upward mobility is fading for huge numbers of people, especially those who need it most,” Koch wrote in his latest book, ‘Believe in People: Bottom-Up Solutions For A Top-Down World.’ “Suicide rates are rising, as are deaths from drug overdose…America is on a trajectory toward a two-tiered society–one in which fewer people get ahead and more fall behind.”
Now Koch, with four other billionaire cofounders and NextLadder Ventures, is hoping to help change that.
“It’s exciting that this has been cofounded by five individuals and organizations who have long track records of investing in economic opportunity,” says NextLadder Ventures’ CEO, Ryan Rippel, who previously led the Gates Foundation’s economic mobility efforts and served as interim chief of staff to the Gates Foundation’s CEO and as special assistant to its co-chair, Bill Gates. “In the course of doing this work over the years, they have all come around to a common question of, ‘How do we actually do more for individuals and families who are facing these enormous barriers every day?’” Rippel tells Forbes.
Rippel, 43, is passionate about the mission, having grown up in a single parent household in central Missouri after his father died in a car accident in 1985. He lost his mother to breast cancer nearly two decades later, and inherited hundreds of thousands of dollars of medical debt due to the family’s lack of good insurance.
His story is not unique. More than one in ten Americans are living below the poverty line, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Meanwhile, more than half of the country’s citizens lack economic security, meaning that they aren’t able to set aside any savings after dealing with their monthly expenses, per the nonprofit Urban Institute. Advances in AI and other emerging technologies could play a big role in helping to address these problems.
“We had a common recognition that we’re at an inflection point in the social impact and technology spaces and viewed this as the perfect time to come together and have an opportunity to go further as a group than we could individually,” says Kevin Bromer, the Ballmer Group’s executive director and head of technology and data strategy.
NextLadder Ventures plans to deploy its initial $1 billion funding commitment over the next seven years to support both non-profit and for-profit organizations that share its mission via a mix of grants, equity investments and revenue-based financing, where it will receive a percentage of companies’ sales, rather than stock. Any profits generated by NextLadder Ventures’ equity investments and revenue-based financing arrangements will be reinvested to support its philanthropic mission.
While NextLadder ventures hasn’t made any funding commitments yet, there are a number of non-profits and for-profit companies that its founders have backed or considered backing individually that could be a good fit for their new organization. One example is the non-profit CarePortal, which has developed a platform that connects children and families in need with local churches, businesses and community groups that can provide resources like housing, medical attention and emotional support to help keep kids out of foster care. Another is the for-profit startup Rasa-Legal, whose technology helps its customers expunge their criminal records for nearly a tenth of the typical cost.
Anthropic will provide AI processing power and technical assistance at no cost to the beneficiaries of NextLadder Ventures’ funding to help them innovate and bring their technological solutions to market faster.
NextLadder Ventures plans to add new philanthropic partners and raise additional funding over 15 years. But it also hopes to inspire other public and private funding sources to help build a market of increasingly scalable technologies that help low-income Americans, social workers, legal aid attorneys and other essential service providers overcome the biggest economic obstacles they face. Among them: job loss, housing instability, childcare, health crises and expungement of criminal records. If all goes according to plan, this market will have attracted enough outside funding that the level of required investment by NextLadder Ventures will have decreased a decade and a half from now, at which point the organization’s board will reassess its future.
Regardless of what happens with NextLadder Ventures, though, its five billionaire founders will likely continue to support organizations focused on economic mobility through their own charitable foundations, as they have each done for decades.
This giving has already helped land three of these billionaires on Forbes’ most recent ranking of America’s top 25 philanthropists in February–Gates ranks no. 2, Ballmer no. 8 and Koch no. 25. (Forbes’ lifetime giving estimates only include amounts that have reached their final charitable recipients and don’t count unfulfilled portions of pledges or dollars sitting in foundations or donor-advised funds that have yet to be disbursed.)
With his ex-wife Melinda French Gates, Bill Gates has already doled out an estimated $47.7 billion–almost all through the Gates Foundation–to organizations focused on health and poverty alleviation. According to its 2024 annual report, the Gates Foundation made nearly $200 million of grants through its U.S. Economic Mobility & Opportunity and Women’s Economic Empowerment programs last year.
Gates’ successor as CEO of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, has donated roughly $5 billion to date, alongside his wife Connie, to organizations focused on economic mobility. Among the couple’s largest pledges in recent years: $165 million to help dropout-prevention nonprofit Communities In Schools scale its student support services to an additional 1,000 majority low-income schools by 2027 and $175 million to support nonprofit StriveTogether’s plan “to put 4 million more young people on a path to economic mobility” by 2030. The Ballmers have also pledged nearly $600 million to Blue Meridian Partners, which has raised more than $4.5 billion so far to address poverty and boost economic and social mobility.
Charles Koch, meanwhile, has given away an estimated $1.9 billion to nonprofits focused on education, poverty alleviation and criminal justice reform, almost all of which was donated through Koch’s Stand Together nonprofit network, which also raises money from likeminded businesspeople and is the vehicle through which he is donating to NextLadder Ventures.
While Intuit founder Scott Cook and hedge fund investor John Overdeck have yet to crack the ranks of the top 25 philanthropists, they have donated nearly $500 million apiece through their two foundations.
While these five billionaire philanthropists and their foundations will continue to pursue their own initiatives, they’ll be working together with NextLadder Ventures on the issue of economic mobility for at least the next 15 years. That’s pretty unique, according to Brian Hooks, the CEO of Koch’s Stand Together nonprofit network.
“I don’t think there’s ever been a collaboration among philanthropies quite like this,” Hooks says. “The potential for all of us to do much more than we could in another situation is just enormous.”
