Justin Steele on how AI is closing the information gap in grantmaking
Updated: Aug 17
Justin Steele spent a decade as a funder at Google.org, giving away hundreds of millions of dollars before leaving at the end of 2024 to co-found Outdoorithm Collective, a nonprofit focused on connecting families with public lands and campgrounds in the United States. Finding himself on the other side of the funding table for the first time, he quickly discovered how broken and fragmented the grant-prospecting process really is. That frustration, combined with a self-taught crash course in coding with AI tools, led him to build a simple matching tool for his own nonprofit. That tool became Kindora, a public benefit corporation he co-founded with Karibu Nayaga to serve as an AI-driven fundraising intelligence layer for the nonprofit and social enterprise sector.
In this conversation, Justin explains how Kindora crawls tens of thousands of funder websites and PDFs to build a searchable, continuously updated database of open grant opportunities, funder histories, program officers, and trustees, going back three years and covering the United States, Canada, and Europe, including the United Kingdom. He describes how organizations can access this intelligence for free through a simple AI chat interface, including as a connector inside Claude, and how paid credits unlock deeper research and evaluation tools. He also shares an early data finding from Kindora's own query logs: a striking gap between how much nonprofits are searching for technology and AI-related funding and how little of that funding is actually available.
Beyond the platform itself, Justin makes the case for why proximity to a problem, paired with AI-assisted building, may matter more right now than traditional academic pedigree. He talks candidly about the environmental and bias-related tradeoffs of AI, why he believes the people closest to social problems are best positioned to solve them, and where he sees Kindora heading next, from helping organizations find collaborators for joint grant applications to eventually helping funders discover trust-based connections to potential grantees.
In this episode, you'll learn:
How Justin Steele's own fundraising struggles at a brand-new nonprofit led him to build what became Kindora
How Kindora aggregates and structures grant and funder data from over 80,000 funder websites, including PDF-based disclosures
Why open grant opportunities, not just mission-fit matching, became the platform's core early product
How organizations can access Kindora for free through an AI chat interface, including as a connector inside Claude
What Kindora's own query data reveals about the mismatch between demand for AI and technology funding and its actual availability
Why Justin believes proximity to a problem and creative "taste," rather than formal engineering or business credentials, are becoming the real differentiators in building useful technology
How data transparency around philanthropic giving varies across the United States, the United Kingdom, and the rest of Europe
Where Kindora is headed next, including efforts to help organizations find collaborators for joint applications and to surface trust-based connections between funders and grantees
About Justin Steele
Justin Steele is Co-Founder and CEO of Kindora, a Public Benefit Corporation democratizing professional fundraising tools for every nonprofit.
At Google.org, he directed $700 million in philanthropic grants over a decade and currently serves as a trustee of The San Francisco Foundation. But when he and his wife Sally launched their own nonprofit, Outdoorithm Collective (which takes urban families on transformative camping adventures), they couldn't afford the very fundraising tools that would help them succeed. So he coded something better with AI.
A Harvard MBA/MPA with an undergraduate engineering degree who started his career at Bain and Bridgespan, Justin now combines big-company experience with startup grit to ensure every good idea has a fair shot at success.
Sally and Justin are raising their four daughters in Oakland, CA, United States.