public-benefit-corporation
(51)
OpenAI Bet the Company on a Cost Curve It Couldn't Escape
A nonprofit lab discovered that intelligence needs industrial-scale capital. Eleven years, 900 million weekly ChatGPT users and a $122 billion funding round later, OpenAI is testing whether mission control can survive commercial gravity.
Jeremy Gowler Is Building for the Minutes Before Medicine Arrives
After two decades commercializing vaccines and biopharmaceuticals, the Ophirex CEO is applying an operator’s eye to a stubborn logistical gap: what can happen between a snakebite and the hospital.
Bret Boyd Is Building the Missing Switchboard for American Manufacturing
After four Iraq deployments and a career spent watching organizations wrestle with change, the Sustainment co-founder has chosen an unglamorous but consequential target: the friction keeping 250,000 American manufacturers apart.
The App That Turned Payday Loans Into a Neighborly Favor
SoLo Funds built a lending marketplace with no interest and no mandatory fees, betting that strangers would rather help strangers than let a payday lender do it. Two million users later, the model is either a fix for broken small-dollar credit or a regulatory magnet - and the founders keep insisting it is the first.
The Startup Dragging Farm Payroll Out of the 1980s
Farm HR still runs on paper packets and cash-back-of-the-check math. Ganaz built a phone-first onboarding, messaging and payroll stack for the 175,000+ workers who feed the rest of us.
How Do You Work the Dark Web Without Getting Burned? Build a Throwaway Computer Every Single Time.
Grey Market Labs spent a decade turning intelligence tradecraft into a button. Now Fortune 100 banks and the US Army rent disposable, fully isolated workspaces that appear in minutes and leave no trail.
The Company Betting Your Cleaning Spray Can Fight the Plastic Crisis
Grove Collaborative turned a frustration with plastic-wrapped soap into a plastic-neutral retailer. The turnaround since is a lesson in what it costs to actually mean it.
How a Teacher-Written Curriculum Reached 4.6 Million Students
Great Minds began as an education advocacy group and became a public benefit corporation selling knowledge-rich math, literacy and science programs. Its wager is unusually concrete: give teachers coherent materials, then stay for the difficult work of implementation.
Kickstarter
Kickstarter made the crowd a gatekeeper for creative work. Now it is trying to solve the less romantic part of the bargain - everything that happens before the campaign opens and after the funding meter turns green.
Vita Coco
How two guys and a bar-room question about homesickness became a public company that pours roughly half of America's coconut water - and files its social mission in the same drawer as its earnings.
Alex Fink
He watched his parents tune into Voice of America at 4 a.m. Decades later he is building the software brain for drone swarms - and an app to clean up the news. The through-line is simpler than it looks.
Parametric
Parametric is a San Francisco robotics company building autonomous physical businesses - operations that run themselves. Starting with a wash-and-fold laundromat, its bimanual mobile robots use reinforcement learning to fold, sort, and handle laundry, learning new behaviors on-site from customer feedback in under an hour. The team applies frontier-lab techniques - dense reward models, an RLHF-style feedback loop, and interpretability tools borrowed from language research - to physical work, reporting 3x higher task reliability than leading baseline models on matched hardware.
Adore Me
Adore Me is a New York-based intimates brand that set out in 2011 to sell well-made bras and lingerie at prices a student could afford, and ended up rewriting how the category is merchandised. Founded by Harvard MBA Morgan Hermand-Waiche, the company paired a wide size range (30-46 bands, A-I cups) with a monthly membership, an at-home try-on box, and an unusually large in-house engineering group in New York and Bucharest that built roughly 15 internal tools for planning, sourcing, and personalization. It reached an estimated $250 million in sales and more than 1.2 million active customers before Victoria's Secret & Co. acquired it in a deal announced November 2022 at $400 million cash upfront plus earnouts, closing January 2023. Adore Me became the only US lingerie brand certified as a B Corporation in 2022. Under its parent it has since narrowed: the founder departed in August 2025, the VIP subscription that defined the model ended in February 2026, and Victoria's Secret recorded a $120 million impairment on the business that same quarter.
Ampion, PBC
Ampion, PBC is a Boston-based public benefit corporation and software platform for community solar and distributed generation. Its enterprise technology handles subscriber acquisition, billing, revenue management, customer care, and sustainability reporting for solar asset owners, connecting households and businesses to local solar farms so they can lower electricity bills without rooftop installations or upfront costs. Ampion manages hundreds of megawatts across multiple U.S. states and has saved subscribers more than $42 million in electricity costs.
OP Labs PBC
OP Labs PBC is the core software development company behind Optimism, an Ethereum Layer 2 network, and the OP Stack, the open-source framework that powers the Superchain - a network of blockchains including chains launched by Sony, Uniswap, Kraken and (until 2026) Coinbase's Base. Founded in 2019 out of the nonprofit Plasma Group, OP Labs raised $178.5M from Paradigm and a16z at a $1.65B valuation and structures itself as a Public Benefit Corporation committed to scaling Ethereum's technology and values, including funding open-source public goods.
Sustainment
Sustainment is an Austin-based public benefit corporation building an AI-native software platform for industrial sourcing, procurement, and supplier management. Founded in 2020 by military veterans and technology executives, it helps commercial OEMs, contract manufacturers, and Department of Defense teams find suppliers, run RFQs, manage purchase orders, and track supplier performance - with the broader mission of strengthening a resilient, domestic U.S. manufacturing base.
Inflection AI
Inflection AI is a Palo Alto-based artificial intelligence company, structured as a public benefit corporation, founded in 2022 by Mustafa Suleyman, Reid Hoffman, and Karen Simonyan. Originally known for the empathetic consumer chatbot Pi and its Inflection large language models, the company was reshaped in March 2024 after Microsoft licensed its technology for roughly $650 million and hired most of its team. Under CEO Sean White, Inflection re-founded itself as an enterprise-focused AI provider, selling data-secure, customizable models (Inflection 3.0) that let organizations own their intelligence, data, and infrastructure - including an on-premises appliance developed with Intel.
Amae Health
Amae Health is a Los Angeles-based, psychiatry-led healthcare company building in-person outpatient clinics for people living with severe mental illness such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and treatment-resistant depression. Founded in 2022 by Stas Sokolin and Sonia Garcia, it pairs a wraparound clinical team - psychiatrists, therapists, primary care providers, dietitians, health coaches, peer mentors and social workers - with a data platform built on Palantir Foundry. The company reports a 30-day hospital readmission rate under 4% versus a 23% national average, and raised a $25M Series B in November 2025, bringing total funding to more than $50M.
Ophirex, Inc.
Ophirex, Inc. is a Corte Madera, California public benefit biotech company building the first genuinely new approach to snakebite in more than a century. Its lead candidate, varespladib, is a small-molecule inhibitor of sPLA2 - an enzyme found in roughly 95% of snake venoms - formulated for easy oral or injectable use so treatment can begin in minutes, in the field, rather than hours later at a distant hospital. Founded by expedition physician Matthew Lewin, the company targets a neglected killer that claims roughly 100,000 lives a year, aiming at both human and veterinary markets across the developing world and defense applications.
Nate Owen
Nate Owen is the founder and CEO of Ampion, a Boston-based Public Benefit Corporation that acquires and manages community solar subscribers across the country. He started Ampion in 2014 after two decades running Energy Services Group, the back-office software company he founded in 1996 to serve the newly deregulated electric and gas markets. Under Owen, Ampion has grown to roughly 120 employees, manages about 1.5 GW of community solar capacity, and says it has saved subscribers more than $42 million on their electricity bills.
Level Forward
Level Forward is a Los Angeles-based public benefit entertainment company co-founded in 2018 by philanthropist and filmmaker Abigail Disney and producer Adrienne Becker. It develops, produces, and finances films, documentaries, and stage productions that pair commercial ambition with social progress, backing work such as the film The Assistant and the Tony-nominated Broadway shows Jagged Little Pill, Slave Play, and What the Constitution Means to Me. Legally bound to weigh profit against public benefit, the company routes a share of proceeds and cultural attention toward nonprofit partners working on gender and racial equity, youth empowerment, and gun-violence prevention.
Nucleos
Nucleos is a San Francisco Bay Area public benefit corporation building secure e-learning software for people who are incarcerated. Its Learning Platform runs inside the locked-down IT environments of prisons and jails, stripping out the roughly 95% of digital coursework that facilities normally block for security reasons, so incarcerated learners can access GED prep, college degrees, vocational training, and wellness programs on tablets and kiosks. Founded by Noah Freedman and Camila Vega out of a Stanford education-technology project, Nucleos aims to reduce recidivism by making education - one of the most effective reentry interventions - actually usable behind bars.
OpenInvest, a J.P. Morgan company
OpenInvest is a San Francisco fintech that built the first automated platform for values-based investing, letting advisors and their clients tilt portfolios toward causes like decarbonization, deforestation-free supply chains and workforce diversity while tracking measurable impact. Founded in 2015 as one of the very few VC-backed Public Benefit Corporations and backed by Y Combinator, Andreessen Horowitz and QED, it was acquired by J.P. Morgan in 2021 and folded into the bank's Private Bank and Wealth Management offerings, where its technology powers personalized ESG customization and impact reporting at scale.
Oro
Oro is a Los Angeles social fintech that turns housing into a workplace benefit. Its B2B platform lets employers offer housing wellness to every worker - renters, buyers, and owners - through concierge housing assistance, rent-to-credit reporting, homebuyer education, down payment savings programs, and housing loans. Founded by former Big Law partner George Fatheree, Oro is a Delaware public benefit corporation that raised $3 million in seed funding in January 2026 to make housing the next standard employee benefit.
Oumi
Oumi (Open Universal Machine Intelligence) is a Kirkland/Bellevue, Washington-based public benefit corporation building a fully open-source, end-to-end platform for foundation models. Founded in 2024 by ex-Google, Apple, Meta and Microsoft engineers, its open software stack lets researchers and enterprises prepare data, pretrain, fine-tune, evaluate and deploy LLMs and vision-language models - from 10M to 405B parameters - anywhere from a laptop to a cloud cluster. Backed by $10M in seed funding and a coalition of 13 top research universities, Oumi pitches itself as the 'Linux of AI': a neutral, collaborative, unconditionally open alternative to closed frontier labs.
Pasteur Labs & ISI
Pasteur Labs & ISI is a New York-based public-benefit deep-tech company building 'Simulation Intelligence' - the systematic merger of AI, physics simulation, and scientific computing. Its AI-native, GPU-accelerated, end-to-end differentiable physics platform gives engineers and scientists an in-silico playground to run thousands of what-if scenarios and shrink the gap between digital models and physical reality. Founded in 2021 by AI researcher Alexander Lavin and staffed by veterans of DeepMind, NASA, CERN, Tesla, Nvidia and Ansys, the company targets industrial R&D, energy, climate, and space & defense, and stewards the open-source Tesseract framework for differentiable scientific computing.
Surgo Health
Surgo Health is a Washington, DC-based Public Benefit Corporation building healthcare's universal 'Why Engine' - an AI-powered platform that decodes the beliefs, biases, and barriers driving human health decisions. By combining behavioral science, data science, and machine learning, its products (BehavioralPulse, Mosaic, Derin, and EchoHER) help life sciences companies, payers, providers, and public-sector organizations understand the people behind the patients and design more effective, human-centered care.
Verustruct
Verustruct is a New Haven-based construction-technology company building a gantry-less 3D printing system to make affordable, sustainable housing at scale. Founded by former SpaceX engineer Nick Callegari, its patent-pending translational slipform printer extrudes load-bearing walls with embedded mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems, then scales itself up layer by layer, sidestepping the bulky gantry frames that cap the size of most additive-construction projects. Organized as a public benefit corporation, Verustruct aims to cut home construction cost by roughly half and emissions by around 40 percent.
Wasted* PBC
Wasted* PBC is a Vermont public benefit corporation reinventing the humble porta-potty. Its waterless, chemical-free, solar-ventilated toilets separate and collect human waste on-site, then a Vermont R&D team recovers the nutrients and turns them into WeeBloom, a commercially registered struvite fertilizer sold to farms and gardeners. Grown out of the nonprofit Do Good Sh*t, Wasted* is building a circular economy for something everyone would rather not think about - closing the loop from toilet to topsoil.
Ben Parry
Ben Parry is the CEO of Compost Crew, a Rockville, Maryland public benefit corporation turning food scraps into soil across the Washington, D.C. region. After more than a decade financing solar and wind projects on five continents, he bought a scrappy three-truck compost hauler in 2018 and grew it into one of the Mid-Atlantic's largest organics recyclers, with more than 20,000 customers, a 40-truck fleet, and a network of local Compost Outpost sites that close the loop between kitchen buckets and nearby farms.