Humanity faces a number of long-term challenges, such as climate change and inter-planetary exploration. Our current financial systems do a great job at incentivizing private capital to fund the startups that tackle near-term engineering challenges, especially when there is an clear path to revenue. However when it comes to long-term science and research, capital markets have often failed to prioritize long-term risky work over short-term profits.

If we want to drastically grow the funding of long-term research that will unlock the path to our long-term prosperity, we need fundamentally different systems for funding science. Impact certificates and impact markets are new coordination mechanisms that track measurable claims of impact. Our goal is to attract at least an order of magnitude more private capital to help fund long-term research and reduce risk for funders and projects alike, while improving accountability.