We are already implementing several elements of the refreshed strategy, particularly as it pertains to shaping the future of generative AI. In 2025, a majority of our programmatic budget and activities will be directed to the new strategy.

We expect our future work to span across four key societal drivers of technology: policy, markets, culture, and technology itself. This could include supporting individuals and organizations that are:

• Developing and implementing a comprehensive governance framework—including policies, institutions, regulations, and accountability structures.
• Partnering with companies, entrepreneurs, and investors to value and uplift workers, communities, and societal impact alongside shareholders—including new incentives, investment, engagement, standards, open collaboration, and best practices.
• Cultivating an inclusive and representative digital technology system, in particular, expanding who finances, creates, advocates, governs, and delivers it.
• Building durable, resilient, and diverse coalitions and narratives that can bend the arc of our digital future toward shared power, prosperity, and possibilities.

We remain steadfastly committed to our core values, as before, and to bringing a diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging lens into all our work. While our underlying interests will be unchanged, our approach will, however, be different in terms of what and who we are funding given our new digital lens. In our strategic orientation and goals, we will be deliberate and intentional about ensuring that people’s expertise, experiences, and outcomes in relationship with technology are our highest priority, not the tech itself. This will include, for example:

• New narratives about technology that position people—not technology—as the protagonists, anchored in a cohort of diverse, multi-disciplinary visionaries and voices.
• Movements, institutions, and governance models that broaden who sees themselves with the power to steer tech and shape policy.
• Under-represented stakeholders are equitably built into accountability structures and decision-making bodies.
• Efforts to champion new and more diverse makers, funders, models, and technologies that provide alternatives to the status quo.

We are already working with some pioneering groups who bring these considerations into the world of tech, groups such as:

• Black Innovation Alliance: A coalition of 175 member organizations closing the racial wealth gap by building pathways that provide equitable access to resources, knowledge, and opportunities to Black entrepreneurs, tech founders, and creative technologists.
• Kinfolk Tech: Their mission is to use art, emerging technologies, and education to uproot oppressive systems, and empower the next generation so that they may imagine, and build, an equitable future. They collaborate with educators, historians, and genealogical experts to bring living, breathing history to life in immersive augmented reality.
• Native Nations Institute: Housed at the University of Arizona, the Institute amplifies Indigenous Peoples’ rights and interests in data sovereignty, including traditional knowledge, open data, machine learning, broad data sharing, and big data initiatives. It advances nation-state networks and individuals to implement and expand the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance (collective benefit, authority to control, responsibility, and ethics).
• National Black Tech Ecosystem Association: The Association empowers on-the-ground black tech activists and black tech ecosystem builders to eradicate racial tech disparities in their cities by helping them to strengthen their local black tech ecosystems.

Under the new strategy, Omidyar Network will build out partnerships with organizations like these, among others including Equity Engine, Media Justice, Mijente, and Power Rising, and we will continue to strengthen our existing relationships with Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

While we are still finalizing our specific investment priorities, we know we will not be funding a number of important aspects of digital tech that we simply lack the resources to attend to (or other funders sufficiently support), including but not limited to:

• Coping with the downstream effects of digital technology
• Advancing digital technology or applications in service of the Sustainable Development Goals (e.g., education, health, climate)
• Advancing other forms of technology (e.g., crypto, NFTs, Web3 applications or services, robotics, space exploration, medicine/bio, energy, transportation, agriculture, environmental, and advanced materials)
• Catalyzing social impact companies and social entrepreneurs
• Equipping non-profits or philanthropy to use or employ tech
• Applying technology to specific verticals (e.g., financial inclusion, health care, education, agriculture, climate)

We typically source investment opportunities through direct outreach from Omidyar Network staff. We do not have the capacity to manage and vet the hundreds of unsolicited requests that come in each week, so we regret that we cannot accept uninvited business plans, funding proposals, or personal funding requests. We will update our website in the coming months to clearly lay out the areas and problems we are interested in funding, as well as those that are out of focus for us.    

We will continue to focus on having impact in the United States while maintaining awareness of global developments. We will also continue to pay attention to European tech regulations and investments.

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