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Where climate software and data grant money went in 2025

By Andrew Holden

Twenty awards, $81.5 million disbursed, and a single grant purpose on the record: "grants to protect the environment." That's the shape of the climate software and data funding landscape in 2025, at least as far as the awards captured in this dataset go. The figure is a floor, not a ceiling. Disclosed grant data in this sector is notoriously patchy, with foundation grants frequently absent from public filings until 12 to 18 months after disbursement. What you're looking at here is a confirmed, auditable slice of where money moved.

Past awards are the strongest signal available for where money will move next. Funders rarely pivot their entire thesis in a single cycle. If an organisation received a seven-figure cheque for environmental monitoring or conservation data infrastructure in 2025, the funder behind it almost certainly has a follow-on cycle open or planned. The analysis below is meant to be used that way: not as history, but as a prospecting map.

The biggest cheques

The top awards skew large. Five of the twelve grantees named in the dataset received $5 million or more, which tells you something important about who these funders are targeting. These are not seed-stage pilot grants.

Savanna Institute: $12,000,000

The single largest award in the dataset went to the Savanna Institute, a US-based nonprofit focused on perennial crops and agroforestry systems in the American Midwest. A $12 million grant for environmental protection at this scale points toward landscape-level data and modelling work, likely covering carbon sequestration measurement and soil health monitoring across agricultural systems. If your work sits at the intersection of agricultural data and climate outcomes, this award is worth studying.

RARE: $9,549,079

RARE is a conservation organisation with programmes spanning community-based fisheries management and land conservation, operating across multiple geographies from a US base. An award approaching $9.6 million suggests multi-year programme funding, probably tied to behavioural and data-driven approaches to resource management. RARE's model is explicitly about using data to change conservation practice at the community level.

Global Witness: $6,850,000

Global Witness investigates environmental and human rights abuses, with a significant research and data operation focused on deforestation, land rights, and supply chain accountability. A grant of this size in 2025 almost certainly funds investigative data infrastructure, satellite analysis, or supply chain transparency tools. For founders building environmental accountability software, this award confirms that funders see data journalism and digital investigation as legitimate environmental protection work.

Spark Climate Solutions: $6,000,000

Spark Climate Solutions operates as a climate philanthropic intermediary, identifying and funding early-stage climate work that larger funders might not reach directly. A $6 million award here is unusual in that it may represent regranting capacity rather than direct programme delivery. Organisations in this position are worth watching as potential funders themselves, not just as peers.

Client Earth USA: $5,000,000

Client Earth uses law as a primary tool for environmental protection, with a growing data and digital evidence operation that supports its litigation and policy work. The $5 million award reflects continued funder confidence in legal accountability as a climate strategy. For software founders, Client Earth's work on environmental data as legal evidence is an underappreciated adjacent market.

CTrees: $4,000,000

CTrees is one of the few organisations in this dataset that is explicitly a data and technology company operating in the climate space. It builds global tree canopy and carbon monitoring tools using satellite imagery and ground-truth data. A $4 million grant award confirms that funders are willing to back the technical infrastructure layer, not just the programmes that use it. This is the clearest direct comparable in the dataset for founders building climate monitoring or carbon data products.

Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development: $3,782,370

IGSD works on climate policy, with particular focus on short-lived climate pollutants (methane, black carbon, HFCs) and the data systems used to track and regulate them. The award size, nearly $3.8 million, is consistent with multi-year policy research and advocacy operations that require robust data capabilities. Emissions monitoring software founders should note this as evidence that pollutant-specific data work attracts serious grant support.

Who wrote the cheques

This is where the dataset runs into its limits. All twenty awards in this dataset are recorded with the funder field absent. That's not unusual for this sector: private foundations are not always required to disclose grant recipients in real time, and many awards surface only through grantee filings or delayed foundation reporting.

What can be inferred, cautiously, from the grantee list is the likely funder profile. Organisations like The Nature Conservancy, World Wildlife Fund, and Conservation Law Foundation are reliably funded by a small cluster of large environmental foundations: Bezos Earth Fund, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Packard Foundation, Hewlett Foundation, and Wellcome Leap among the most active at this scale. Spark Climate Solutions' inclusion suggests at least one major climate philanthropic intermediary was active in this cycle. CTrees is the kind of technical grantee that tends to attract funding from foundations with explicit technology-for-climate theses.

If you are prospecting for funders in this space, the grantee list is your starting point. Search each organisation's most recent Form 990 (for US nonprofits, these are publicly available through ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer) and look at Schedule B for major donors. That reverse-engineering approach will surface the funders behind these awards faster than waiting for foundation reports.

Reading the patterns

The award size distribution here is notably compressed toward the upper end. Of the twelve named grantees, nine received more than $3 million. That is not typical of environmental grant portfolios in aggregate, where median awards tend to be well below $500,000. The most plausible explanation is that this dataset is capturing a specific tier of institutional funder, one that deploys capital in tranches large enough to fund multi-year operations at established organisations. Early-stage applicants should not read this as the full picture of what's available; it reflects where large cheques went, not where all cheques went.

Geographically, every named grantee in this dataset is US-based. That concentration is partly an artefact of disclosure patterns (US nonprofits file publicly; many international equivalents do not) and partly a genuine reflection of where environmental philanthropy at this scale is concentrated. Founders and nonprofits outside the US should not assume these funders are US-only in their grantmaking. Global Witness, for example, operates internationally despite its US entity receiving the award recorded here. The funder geography is opaque, but the grantee geography is not a reliable proxy for funder eligibility criteria.

The recipient types are mixed in a way worth noting. You have pure-play data and technology organisations (CTrees), policy and legal organisations with data operations (IGSD, Client Earth), conservation delivery organisations (RARE, The Nature Conservancy, WWF), and investigative/advocacy organisations (Global Witness). Funders operating at this scale are clearly not sector-purists. Software and data capability appears to be valued as a component of a broader programme rather than as a standalone product thesis. Founders pitching a data tool will likely fare better framing it around an environmental outcome than around the technical architecture.

Use this in Raise Lens

The funders behind these awards are not yet fully identified in the dataset, but you can use Raise Lens to track them as they surface and to find comparable open opportunities now.

  1. Go to /funders?sector=climate-software-data and save the funders whose stated interest areas match the grantees above. Set a Watchlist alert so you're notified when new opportunities from those funders are added.
  2. On /opportunities, filter by sector (climate, environment) and recipient type (nonprofit, for-profit) to see which open grants match the programme areas funded in 2025: agroforestry data, carbon monitoring, emissions tracking, legal accountability.
  3. Save a search combining your sector tags with award size ranges above $1 million. The distribution in this dataset confirms that seven-figure grants in climate software and data are not rare; you should know when they appear.
  4. For any funder you identify through reverse-engineering the grantee 990s, use /draft to prepare a first-pass letter of enquiry while the research is fresh. The grant purpose language in this dataset ("grants to protect the environment") is deliberately broad; your application will need to do the specificity work.

Browse the full set of climate software and data funders on Raise Lens, including those with open cycles now, at /funders?sector=climate-software-data. As funder attribution on 2025 awards becomes clearer through foundation disclosures over the coming months, this page will reflect the updated picture.