About
The Wildlife Technology Fund designs & runs scientific programs to solve problems facing, and caused by, wildlife.
What we do
Wildlife Technology designs programs to close the gap between basic science and action to help people and animals. We use tools from the innovation landscape — ARPA-style coordinated research programs, milestone payments, focused research organizations — and apply them to the problems that are both highly neglected, and large in scale.
To do this, we focus on developing talent, scoping new program areas, and running coordinated, time-bound programs focused on vetted issues. Broadly, programs we run focus on two kinds of barriers to impact:
Many promising programs get stuck in a "valley of death" between theory and impact. The science mostly exists, but no one has integrated the pieces to turn scientific knowledge into a deployable intervention.
Example: taking rodent fertility control from a lab-explored concept to a viable prototype that companies can develop.
Some interventions are blocked upstream, by a lack of fundamental knowledge about wild animals and their ecosystems. We look for scientific chokepoints and fund research to release them.
Example: many interventions have uncertain effects on insect populations, which adds high uncertainty to the value of the approach. Better ways to estimate and monitor insect populations in real time could unlock many solutions to wildlife issues that currently seem too ecologically risky to implement.
Team
Advisors
A fund of Renaissance Philanthropy
The Wildlife Technology Fund is a fund of Renaissance Philanthropy. Funds at Renaissance are focused on a specific, time-bound thesis and run by an empowered program manager. For more on the fund model, see here.
