TED’s Audacious Project raises $1 billion in 2 days to fund initiatives for these winning nonprofits

The business landscape continues to evolve rapidly, and staying competitive requires both awareness and the right operational infrastructure. This article explores TED’s Audacious Project raises $1 billion in 2 days to fund initiatives for these winning nonprofits and what it means for solo operators, small teams, and growing businesses in 2025.

35 major donor families pledged $1.03 billion to nonprofits undertaking multiyear projects. Last October, 35 major donor families, calling their collaborative The Audacious Project, gathered in California and committed $1.03 billion to more than a dozen nonprofits whose proposed projects span multiple years and take on major challenges.The collaborative, housed at TED, announced the winning nonprofits Tuesday, after spending more than a year selecting the groups and helping them sharpen pitches for larger projects than philanthropic funders typically support. It’s not until the donors meet in person that they decide how much to give to each group.Jennifer Loving, the CEO of the San Jose-based nonprofit Destination: Home, said it was “shock and awe,” when they learned the donors had met their funding request to help expand homeless prevention services to multiple U.S. cities.“It’s not for the faint of heart to work on this issue in America,” Loving said, referencing the stigma around poverty. “And so you kind of brace yourself. You never know if people are going to see what you see and it was beautiful. It was really beautiful.”Connie Ballmer, cofounder of Ballmer Group along with her husband Steve Ballmer, the former CEO of Microsoft and owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, has been a donor since 2021, when she went with one of their sons to learn more about funding around climate change.“Nowhere that I know of can you raise a billion dollars in two days,” she said. “For an organization to raise an amount — whether it’s $40, $60, $80 million, I mean, do you know how long that takes them to do that kind of fundraising?”This year, the grantees also include the Arc Institute, a relatively new research group in California, to support its development of a virtual model of a cell that it hopes will help scientists identify treatments for complex diseases like Alzheimer’s.The South Africa-based group, Tiko, also received funding to expand its services for teenage girls, including contraception, HIV treatment and responses to sexual violence. It was the third time Tiko had applied for funding from Audacious, said CEO Serah Joy Malaba, with the hope of scaling their work to reach more girls.In total, 55 major donor families have participated in at least one round of The Audacious Project’s work. The group expands by invitation and the formal criteria that donors be willing to commit at least $10 million to the funding round. Many end up donating more, in part inspired by the commitments that others make in the room.Another donor, Tegan Acton, who cofounded Wildcard Giving along with her husband, Brian Acton, a cofounder of WhatsApp, said she participates because she believes in collective action and values the focus on funding solutions developed by people close to the problems. Acton also said she’s enjoyed seeing how different donors approach their funding decisions.“Some people come and they have a binder printed and they have a thousand tabs with little notes about every project and they’ve marked up the appendices” she said, whereas others, “show up and watch the videos and see what sparks interest.”As part of the application process, finalists record something like a TED Talk that introduces themselves and their project.Loving, from Destination: Home, said the guidance from Audacious and The Bridgespan Group, a nonprofit consulting firm, helped sharpen their plan for scaling their approach to homelessness prevention. The initiative, Right at Home, identifies people and families most at risk of losing their housing and gives them money and support so they don’t. The approach now has won significant public funding in San Jose.“Going through this process was probably one of the most rigorous things we’ve ever done,” Loving said. “I can say with total confidence that it made us smarter.”Loving’s project is a good example of the kind of big change that The Audacious Project seeks to identify. Her group had not aspired to work nationally but identified a solution they think may help other places. Rather than opening new offices or expanding, they will partner with local groups, bring them funding and ask them to participate in research to assess the impact.For the first time this year, some organizations received a second commitment from Audacious donors, including Last Mile Health. Their initial grant in 2018 helped to train many more community health workers in multiple African countries, going from 2,000 to 23,000. This time, they received $20 million to again train more of these front line health workers but also to support an ongoing project to coordinate and mobilize more domestic funding from the countries where they work.“It’s not just a philanthropic investment and then a cliff,” said Lisha McCormick, CEO of Last Mile Health. Instead, the funds will support a reworking of how governments fund their public health systems following major cuts to U.S. foreign aid, which made up a significant portion of some countries’ health budgets.Anna Verghese, executive director of The Audacious Project, said they’d considered making second round grants for a while.“The honest question that we and our donor community had to wrestle with is, what kinds of partners are we if we walk away right when that momentum is building?” she said.

Why This Matters for Small Business Operators

Business owners managing operations with fragmented tools — separate CRM, invoicing, HR, and analytics platforms — are increasingly disadvantaged. The operational overhead of switching between dashboards, reconciling data, and maintaining multiple subscriptions compounds quickly. Teams now spend an average of 15+ hours per week on tool management that adds zero revenue.

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The Fragmentation Problem

Most SMBs today use 6-10 separate software tools to run their operations. Each tool has its own pricing model, login, data format, and API quirks. The result is a web of integrations that breaks regularly, data that never fully syncs, and a finance team that spends more time reconciling spreadsheets than analysing trends.

• Average SMB spends $1,200–$3,600/year on overlapping software subscriptions
• 43% of small business owners report data inconsistency across their tools as a top operational challenge
• Integration maintenance consumes an estimated 20% of developer time at companies with custom stacks

What an Integrated Business OS Changes

Platforms like Mewayz approach this differently. Rather than offering one monolithic tool, a modular business OS provides 207 independently deployable business modules that share a single database and unified permissions model. You activate what you need — CRM, invoicing, booking, payroll, link-in-bio, fleet management — and they work together natively from day one.

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4. Start with a free tier: Platforms that offer a genuine free tier let you test integration without commitment. Mewayz's free tier includes CRM, invoicing, and link-in-bio with no time limit.
5. Migrate incrementally: Move one module at a time, validate the data, then proceed to the next.

The White-Label Opportunity for Agencies

For digital agencies and platform businesses, there's a compelling additional angle: offering clients a fully branded operational platform rather than recommending a patchwork of third-party tools. A white-label business OS creates a recurring revenue stream and dramatically increases client retention — agencies that offer software retain clients 3× longer than those that only provide services.

Looking Ahead

The businesses that consolidate onto unified, modular platforms over the next 12-24 months will have a structural cost and speed advantage over those still running fragmented tool stacks. The technology exists, pricing has democratised, and migration paths are clearer than ever.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is TED's Audacious Project?

Audacious Project was a collaborative effort by 35 major donor families in California to raise $1 billion for nonprofits undertaking multiyear projects.

How much did the project raise and how many donor families participated?

The project raised $1.03 billion with the participation of 35 major donor families.

What does this mean for solo operators, small teams, and growing businesses in 2025?

This initiative can provide valuable resources and partnerships for solo operators, small teams, and growing businesses to scale their operations and achieve their goals more efficiently.

How does Mewayz support business growth?

Mewayz offers a comprehensive business OS at $19/month, providing tools and solutions that help businesses automate processes, improve efficiency, and drive growth. Visit app.mewayz.com for more details.