Jack Dorsey’s Start Small expands funding for open source AI and Bitcoin development

Jack Dorsey’s nonprofit initiative, Start Small, has been steadily expanding its financial support for open-source AI projects and Bitcoin development, with cumulative donations now stretching well into the tens of millions of dollars.

The money trail

Start Small’s most notable recipient has been OpenSats, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that channels 100% of its received funds toward Bitcoin developers, researchers, and educational efforts. In May 2023, Dorsey’s initiative donated $10 million to OpenSats, with half of that amount explicitly earmarked for Nostr, a decentralized social protocol that Dorsey has championed as an alternative to platform-controlled social media.

In May 2024, Start Small followed up with an additional $21 million donation aimed at reinforcing Bitcoin and open-source projects through OpenSats. Combined, that’s $31 million flowing into a single organization whose entire mandate is keeping Bitcoin’s open-source ecosystem funded and functional.

OpenSats earned its 501(c)(3) status back in 2021 and has since positioned itself as one of the more transparent funding mechanisms in crypto. The nonprofit doesn’t skim. It doesn’t build products. It just distributes capital to the people writing the code that keeps Bitcoin running.

Separately, Start Small committed $5 million to Brink, another nonprofit focused on supporting Bitcoin Core developers. That pledge is structured to disperse over five years starting in 2023, essentially guaranteeing a stable funding runway for some of the most critical contributors to Bitcoin’s base layer.

The AI angle

Bitcoin isn’t the only sector catching Dorsey’s philanthropic attention. Start Small has also extended funding to open-source AI projects, including EleutherAI, a grassroots research collective that builds and releases large language models with open weights and open data.

Dorsey has publicly connected this philanthropic work to his broader advocacy for open protocols and individual autonomy, reflecting a clear philosophical alignment with decentralized technologies.

Why this matters for the market

For investors watching the broader crypto landscape, the signal here is worth paying attention to. At a time when much of the industry’s capital is chasing memecoins and speculative layer-2 tokens, Dorsey is directing serious money toward the boring but essential work of maintaining and improving Bitcoin’s foundation. That’s a long-term bet on Bitcoin as protocol, not Bitcoin as trading instrument.