Revolutionizing Sustainable Investment
Through Artificial Intelligence

A decade of building AI systems that connected donors with grassroots movements changing the world. From a small team in Geneva to a global network, and now: a new chapter.

2015 · 2025

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Our Story

We set out to prove that systemic change could be funded intelligently

The Altruist League was founded on a conviction: that the most pressing problems of our time (climate, governance, equality, democracy) require investing in the people closest to them. Grassroots movements, from safe houses in Juárez to democracy advocates in the DRC, are the authentic engines of social change. They deserved better tools, better matching, and better capital allocation.

We built a proprietary dataset tracking over a million organizations across 30+ countries. We developed AI systems for donor-partner matching that achieved over 90% accuracy. We created the Altruist Index, a curated portfolio of the highest-performing grassroots organizations globally. And we pioneered the use of large language models and retrieval-augmented generation to empower our analysts with real-time intelligence.

None of it would have been possible without our clients: a small, committed group of foundations, sovereign institutions, and individuals who understood both the promise and the limitations of technology, and who trusted us to push the boundaries of what philanthropic advisory could be.

30+
Countries
90%+
Match accuracy
1M+
Organizations tracked
~150
Altruist Index orgs

The Journey

Ten years of building

2015
Founded in Geneva
Four founding partners set out to build the world's best technology-driven philanthropic advisory. The first analysts begin mapping grassroots organizations worldwide.
2016
Global expansion
Regional offices open in Hong Kong, San Francisco, London, and Nairobi. Locally embedded analysts begin face-to-face engagement with organizations in over 30 countries.
2017
The dataset reaches critical mass
Thousands of organizations cataloged with detailed parameters: leadership, strategy, track record, membership, funding history. The first version of the AI team begins to form.
2018
AI matching system launches
The donor-partner matching model goes live. Within six months: 450+ connections facilitated, 93% match accuracy, and over 95% satisfaction from both donors and organizations.
2019
The Altruist Index™
A curated, constantly updating index of the highest-performing grassroots organizations globally, designed for donors seeking maximum impact through passive investment in systemic change.
2020
For-profit arm spun out and sold
The sustainable investing division, including the Systemic Changemaker Score methodology, is spun out and sold to a strategic investor. The League refocuses entirely on philanthropic advisory and AI.
2021 – 2022
The language model years
Intensive R&D on applying large language models to the League's proprietary data. Early attempts at building from scratch prove costly. The team pivots to fine-tuning open-source models.
2023
RAG and real-time intelligence
Retrieval-augmented generation and embeddings deployed across the platform. Analysts query the entire dataset in natural language. Manual data updating drops below 5%.
2025
A new chapter
The League completes a strategic transaction with a sovereign wealth fund partner. Voting shares are transferred to the Altruist Purpose Trust, ensuring mission continuity for the future.

The Future

Structured for permanence

In 2025, the Altruist League completed a recapitalization into two share classes, combining a strategic partnership with a sovereign wealth fund with a purpose-driven ownership structure inspired by Patagonia's 2022 model.

Class A · Voting Shares

The Altruist Purpose Trust

100% of voting stock was transferred to the Altruist Purpose Trust, whose sole mandate is to ensure the League never deviates from its mission of democratizing philanthropy and empowering grassroots movements. This protects the human-centric, ethical approach to AI regardless of commercial pressures.

Class B · Non-Voting Shares

Strategic Partnership

A portion of non-voting equity was acquired by a sovereign wealth fund partner with a strong systemic mandate, providing growth capital and a powerful institutional ally. Remaining non-voting shares were transferred to a dedicated nonprofit organization to fund systemic change directly through dividends.

Gratitude

To everyone who made this possible

What we built was never just a product. It was a shared conviction that technology, wielded carefully and transparently, could help the world's most determined people change their societies for the better. That conviction was carried by many hands.

Our analysts Our engineers Our clients Our partners League members

From Geneva to Nairobi, from Hong Kong to San Francisco: thank you. The work continues.

Routledge Handbook of AI and Philanthropy

Routledge Handbook of Artificial Intelligence and Philanthropy

The Altruist League case study is one of the central chapters in this open-access volume exploring the intersection of artificial intelligence and social impact. Co-edited by Giuseppe Ugazio and Milos Maricic, the Handbook is freely available to researchers, practitioners, and anyone interested in how technology can serve systemic change.

Access the Handbook (Open Access)