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TL;DR: Applications are open for AIM's first ever animal-only incubation round. The program runs February 2027, and it is different from any round we've run before: we’ve rebuilt the research process with animal welfare in mind, recommending frontier problems rather than fully-scoped solutions, there is a new funded three-month exploration phase after the core program, and two weeks in San Francisco alongside the movement's biggest funders and thinkers. Aaron Boddy (co-founder of Shrimp Welfare Project) has joined to help design and run it. Applications close 13th September.
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A few months ago, we wrote about why now might be the best time ever to start an animal charity. In short: the bottlenecks that limited us to incubating roughly two to four animal charities a year are easing on both sides, us finding more superstar founders excited to work on animal welfare and mid-stage funding becoming less of a limiting factor than it was a few years ago. Meanwhile, the animal movement needs more new interventions and organizations in the pipeline so that efforts to fix factory farming can scale in the coming years. The low-hanging fruit hasn't been picked because barely anyone is in the orchard: Incubating more trailblazing animal charities is one way to help address this.
That post explained why we're running a dedicated animal round. This post explains what’s different about it.
1. Everything is pointed at animals. Our incubation program was built to accommodate a wide range of charity types, and we've long hypothesised that more focused rounds, where the approach is tailored to a specific type of charity’s needs, will increase our hit-rate of field-leading organizations. This round we put that hypothesis to the test: Our research process, our recruitment priorities, the program structure and curriculum, the program managers and the mentors are all being rebuilt around what animal charities specifically need rather than what works on average across cause areas.
2. We're recommending frontier problems, not fully-scoped solutions. Historically our research team handed founders a specified intervention to implement. This round, mostly, we won't. (More on this below).
3. Three funded months to explore. Because we're recommending problems rather than fully-scoped solutions, you won't submit a seed funding proposal at the end of the eight weeks. Instead you’ll submit an “exploration plan” for how you'll immerse yourself in the stakeholder and industry landscape, and design and test candidate theories of change before choosing what to pilot. Stipends will continue throughout the three-month exploration phase, plus a dedicated grant to cover the costs involved (e.g. flights, contractors, materials). And if you already know what you want to build and scale, you don't have to wait — you can submit for seed funding whenever you're ready. The exploration phase is there to provide you the freedom to explore rather than having to submit a premature funding proposal bears little resemblance to your eventual plan and budget needs.
4. Time in San Francisco. As always, the program includes 2 mandatory weeks at the AIM office in London to spend time with your cohort and to immerse yourself in our community of entrepreneurs. But this time, that will be followed by several weeks in San Francisco, optional but strongly recommended, timed to overlap with EAG Bay Area and the Sentient Futures Summit. The point is (1) to test your early thinking on the movement’s thought leaders while it's still cheap to change your mind, and (2) to inspire you to think bigger. All expenses paid, visa support/advice available for your travel to the UK and US.
5. Aaron Boddy is helping run it. Aaron co-founded Shrimp Welfare Project through our program in 2021, having previously not thought much about shrimp at all. Today, SWP provides electrical stunners to dozens of shrimp producers in 9 countries, serving 11 retailers. They estimate that their work currently causes 6.5 billion shrimps per year to experience less suffering at the end of their lives. He has done the thing we're asking founders to do in this next round: explore a neglected problem on the frontier of the animal movement and find and scale new solutions to help them by the billion.
6. Meeting a wider range of financial needs. It's important to us that meeting financial needs isn't a blocker to the best talent founding a charity. Our goal has always been to cover the program’s costs and provide stipends so program participants can focus on founding a charity. In practice, our guidelines and norms about these stipends and about founder salaries after the program have made it difficult for people higher financial needs to choose the charity founder path. To this end, we’re overhauling our stipend policy and founder salary guidance: We will actively encourage those with higher financial needs to request higher stipends, and we are committed to accommodating those requests where reasonable. Meanwhile we will continue to encourage people with lower needs (no dependents, low cost-of-living location) to ask for less so the difference goes to beneficiaries. We have an entire post on changes to AIM’s stipend and salary post coming next week.
7. Bigger ambition. We've incubated field-leading farmed animal charities before, including two that have been recommended by ACE. Given that we know this is possible and that impact is power-lawed, we are focusing all our effort on creating more field leaders. This means we’re not interested in incubating charities that, if successful, will merely inch the movement's current trajectory forward. We want charities that shift what the movement thinks is possible.
Relative to causes like global health, animal welfare has far fewer well-evidenced, fully-scoped interventions that aren't already being pursued extensively by existing actors. But the good news is that it has plenty of big problems that are eminently solvable and have strong willingness to pay from funders, industry or consumers to solve them. So the founder's job becomes exploring the problem space and figuring out how to remove the pain point.
This is fairly typical of how for-profit founders and funders think: Knowing the exact solution from the outset matters less than finding a large-scale pain point with high willingness to pay. Backing talented founders with the resources to explore and test solutions makes for a winning investment.
We believe this change will be very exciting for some and very intimidating for others.
Right now our research team is busy sourcing and assessing over 100 problems at the frontier of the movement and narrowing them to a recommended shortlist. We’ll be assessing each problem on factors like:
We’re far from locking in any recommendations, but what we can do is share some big picture categories that we're excited about, going into the process. We won't necessarily recommend frontier problems in all of these categories, and we'll almost certainly recommend others. (Naturally, we’ll coordinate with the various other incubators working on animal welfare so that we play to our comparative advantages.)
i.e. Developing new welfare technology, driving producer adoption of existing technology, or acting as an evaluator or certifier.
i.e. Getting more, better and faster actionable research produced, for instance by re-granting to academics with milestone-gated funding that pushes on timelines, methodology and relevance to implementers.[1]
i.e. Moving new talent into the movement, helping organisations absorb it through management and onboarding support, or upskilling the people already here.
i.e. Crowding resources into a high-scale, low-attention population the way Shrimp Welfare Project did for farmed shrimp, and LEEP did for lead.
The previous post covers this at length, so briefly: you don't need to be vegan, you don't need an animal-movement background, and you don't need to feel much when you see a chicken. You need to take seriously that factory farming is one of the biggest problems of our time, and be willing to follow the evidence on what will fix it.
We will be incubating charities working on health system strengthening, livelihoods and economic growth in H2 2027. You can apply for that program now as well (and there will be another opportunity to do so early next year).
Thanks for reading!
It may also include enabling more and better monitoring and evaluation of existing animal welfare work, so we can identify and scale what’s working faster.
Super cool!