Our Approach

VENTURE PHILANTHROPY

Venture philanthropy provides a way for donations to work like investments and donors to be more involved by funding highly visible activities to achieve the mission of a charity or nonprofit. The RD Fund aims to deliver life-changing solutions for individuals with retinal degenerative diseases today, while also creating a pipeline of next-generation and novel therapeutic opportunities for tomorrow. The RD Fund is flexible in how it structures investments leveraging equity, debt, royalty, and/or project co-funding. All proceeds of this high-impact philanthropic vehicle are returned back to the Foundation to provide resources to further its mission.

INVESTMENT STRATEGY

RD Fund thesis is generally focused on therapeutic companies that range from nearing a pre-IND to clinically staged programs focused on inherited retinal disease (IRD) conditions and dry AMD. The Fund is geographically agnostic.

The RD Fund is unique in that it can leverage the full weight of the Foundation Fighting Blindness’ knowledge and resources including: natural history studies, My Retina Tracker^® Registry, world-class scientific advisory board and clinical consortium. As a result, the RD Fund leverages both internal resources, and investment capital to attract additional investors and is open to using financial instruments including convertible notes, equity, fixed multiple return on investments, and/or royalties, with a preference for ground floor equity investments.

BY THE NUMBERS as of February 2026. $130 Million assets under management. $90 million deployed. More than $1.25 billion syndicated. More than 50 co-investors. 18 investments.

INVESTMENT THESIS

The Fund’s capital deployment strategy is designed to advance mission-critical innovation while preserving long-term sustainability by deploying capital through two complementary vehicles: the Core Fund and the Discovery Fund. Success is measured by financial returns and progress toward therapeutic milestones and meaningful impact on patients’ lives.

The Core Fund

The Core Fund provides meaningful, sustained capital to advance mid- to late-stage programs with strong translational potential.

Key features include:

Patient-centric impact: Identify and advance investments into mission-aligned therapeutic programs.
Meaningful financial support: Initial check size of $1–5 million (Seed to Series B), with up to $10–15 million in follow-on reserves.
Flexible investment strategy: Includes both dilutive and non-dilutive investment vehicles to balance impact and financial return.
Milestone-driven financing: To responsibly limit the Fund’s donor capital exposure, Capital is deployed in tranches tied to clearly defined scientific or clinical inflection points.
Investments across therapeutic modalities: Target opportunities from genetic therapies, to biologics, small molecules, neuroprotection, optogenetics, and cell therapies, that apply to both IRDs and dry AMD/GA.

The Discovery Fund

The Discovery Fund supports high-risk, high-reward science at its earliest stage with catalytic seed investments, typically starting at $250K.

Catalyst for bold ideas: Provides the first infusion of capital that often determines whether an idea stays on the bench or advances toward the clinic.
De-risking innovation: Helps validate novel technologies, attract follow-on investors, and accelerate clinical readiness.

Both Funds use flexible financing structures, including equity and convertible debt. Operating under an ‘Evergreen’ model, realized gains are reinvested into new opportunities, enabling a self-sustaining structure that advances innovation, without pressure for immediate returns. Capital reserves are maintained to support follow-on investments in high-performing companies, deepening impact as promising programs advance.