The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is a limited liability company established and owned by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan with an investment of "up to $1 billion in Facebook shares in each of the next three years". Its creation was announced on December 1, 2015, for the birth of their daughter, Maxima Chan Zuckerberg. The aim of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is to "advance human potential and promote equality in areas such as health, education, scientific research and energy". In 2017, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative pre-leased a 102,079 square foot portion of the new Broadway Station development in downtown Redwood City, CA.
Activities
Education
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative invested $24 million in Andela, a startup focused on training software developers in Africa through a bootcamp and four-year fellowship program which pairs their trainees with U.S. companies needing development help. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative led the company's Series B funding. On September 8, 2016, Indian education startup Byju's announced raising $50 million in a round co-led by The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and Sequoia Capital, along with investors Sofina, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Times Internet. The funding has been raised to fuel their international expansion. On March 6, 2018 the Harvard Gazette published that the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative would pledge $30 million to the Reach Every Reader project. Both Harvard's President Drew Faust and MIT's President L. Rafael Reif were quoted in the article, as was Priscilla Chan, HGSE Dean James E. Ryan, and MIT's Sanjay Sarma, VP for Open Learning at MIT, and others. The article states: "To make significant progress in early literacy at scale, the team will engage in a rigorous, scientific approach to personalized diagnosis and intervention. They will develop and test a scalable, web-based screening tool for reading difficulties that diagnoses the underlying causes, and a set of targeted home/school interventions that change the way we approach intervention for young children with reading difficulties." The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is supporting the development of a civic tech talent pipeline by funding Coding it Forward. The Initiative has funded a free online learning platform, Summit Learning, that is based on a personalized learning philosophy. The use of the platform in some schools have led to concerns about efficacy and student privacy.
Scientific research
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative's first acquisition took place in January 2017 with the acquisition of Meta Inc., a Toronto-based artificial intelligencescientific literature search engine. On September 2016, CZI announced its new science program, Chan Zuckerberg Science, with $3 billion in investment over the next decade, with Cornelia Bargmann of Rockefeller University announced as the first president of science, to begin October 1, 2016. The goal of the program is to help cure, manage, or prevent all disease by the year 2100. $600 million of the $3 billion would be spent on Biohub, a location in San Francisco's Mission Bay District near the University of California, San Francisco, to allow for easy interaction and collaboration between scientists at University of California, San Francisco; University of California, Berkeley; Stanford University; and other universities in the area, as well as engineers and others. Commentators saw the move as audacious but a worthwhile goal, while noting that the amount of funding is small relative to overall money spent on biomedical research. This funding is equal to roughly 2% of the NIH budget earmarked for basic research over the same time frame. Any patents generated at Biohub would be jointly owned by Biohub and the discoverer's home institution.
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is not a charitable trust or a private foundation but a limited liability company which can be for-profit, can spend money on lobbying, can make political donations, does not have to disclose its pay to its top five executives and has fewer other transparency requirements compared to a charitable trust. Under this legal structure, as Forbes wrote it, "Zuckerberg will still control the Facebook shares owned by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative".
