Building Aligned Infrastructure for Spirit Tech
A concept note on how we will catalyze 100 Spirit Tech ventures over the next decade
Spirit Tech: Field Notes from the Edge is a newsletter written by members of the Spirit Tech Collective (STC). Inspired by the Climate Tech movement, STC’s mission is to 50x the funding and talent flowing into the Spirit Tech sector over the next 10 years, paving the way for greater collective wisdom and flourishing. Our aim with this newsletter is to share the synthesis of our research for feedback as we collectively cultivate the soil to usher in the next wave of Spirit Tech innovation.
In our last article, we explored where the Spirit Tech sector is today and shared a vision for where it could go next. We made the case that is at an inflection point. A new era of Spirit Tech tools — what we call Spirit Tech 3.0 — is beginning to emerge. These tools can meet people where they are and guide them into deeper inner work with more access, skill, and precision than ever before.
To meet this moment, the sector will require more than vision. It calls for new infrastructure.
The biggest bottleneck to bringing the Spirit Tech vision to life is access to aligned funding. Systemic funding misalignment is the number one challenge consistently raised by Spirit Tech founders. Simply throwing money at the sector won’t be enough. The new wave of Spirit Tech entrepreneurs are deeply aware of the soul and mission drift experienced by many in the previous Spirit Tech era. They are determined to build in a different way.
Since publishing our last article, we’ve been sitting with this question:
How we can catalyze the sector with significantly more funding to meet the Spirit Tech 3.0 opportunity while creating a container to support founders preserve the spiritual integrity of their technologies and minimize soul drift?
Over the past few months, we’ve started to see the shape of a solution.
In this article, we share a high-level concept note of that solution. It is a first look at the infrastructure we are working towards and the impact we hope to create.
Over the next six weeks, we’ll publish a series of deep dives that explore each element in more detail.
Here’s the TL:DR of what we’re building:
The core of the vision is the Spirit Tech Foundation — a full-spectrum investment fund designed to catalyze and mature the Spirit Tech sector.
While it will make mostly for-profit investments, the Foundation will be structured as a non-profit. Returns will be reinvested into the ecosystem so every donated dollar supports multiple waves of innovation.
The Foundation will serve as an attraction basin for donors who believe that modern technology has an important role to play in supporting our spiritual development and elevating our collective consciousness.
The Foundation will be paired with the Spirit Tech Stewardship Council — a separate non-profit governed by a small group of Wisdom Keepers. The Council’s mandate will be to create and maintain the container for the sector and support Spirit Tech founders to stay true to their spiritual ethos and mission as they scale.
Our goal is to catalyze 100 Spirit Tech ventures that reach 360 million people over the next decade. This is how we aim to move the needle on one of the most important questions of our time.
We’re sharing an early draft of the concept note to invite co-creation.
We are in the concept validation phase and would love your input. What resonates? What feels off? Please share any thoughts or ideas in the comments.
The Spirit Tech Foundation
While the Spirit Tech market is growing quickly, it is still in early maturation. Competitive market-level returns are unlikely in the first or second investment cycle.
This is why we believe the sector requires catalytic, donor-driven capital to bridge the gap, create the playbooks for spiritually aligned innovation, and lay the foundation for sector growth.
The Spirit Tech Foundation will be a full-spectrum sector-level catalytic fund designed to help high-impact, for-profit Spirit Tech companies scale their products.
The Foundation’s investment mandate is to catalyze the next wave of scalable, scientifically congruent technologies that support people deeply on their human and spiritual development path and help bridge the sector to commercial profitability.
It will be the first fund fully dedicated to technologies that support spiritual development, with investments focused across three initial themes.
Personalized Spiritual Guidance
Therapy and emotional support are already the most popular use case for ChatGPT, showing both need and market opportunity. Coupled with advancing interoception tools and growing scientific insight into mystical states, we can now build technologies that offer personalized, real-time spiritual guidance based on physiological feedback. These tools can support people at every stage of the path, with an increasing potential for impact as AI systems become more finely attuned to our human experience.
Responsible State Modulation
For millennia, psychedelics have opened people into deeper states of connection and awareness, often serving as the opening of a deep spiritual path exploration. Technology now has the potential to create similar openings, helping people expand consciousness and commune directly with the field and with spirit. With proper integration, sequencing, and care, these experiences can serve as anchor points on the journey and become a motivating foundation for sustained spiritual practice and growth.
Paradigm-Shifting Technologies
Nikola Tesla predicted: “The day we begin to study non-physical phenomena, we will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of our existence.” We believe we are entering that decade. Concepts like non-localized consciousness, the human biofield, coherence fields, and the collective informational field are quickly moving into mainstream awareness. Dan Brown’s The Secret of Secrets has spent the last three months on the bestseller list. The book dives into non-localized consciousness and is just the latest example of how far these ideas have come in reaching the mainstream.
Many powerful technologies rooted in these principles already exist and have been used in niche circles for decades. With the “woo-window” rapidly expanding, there is a unique opportunity to modernize these tools into consumer-ready applications that give people direct experience of non-localized consciousness and shift the paradigm to an energetic, frequency-based reality. As science provides the validation, technology will provide the direct experiential access at scale to help us remember the interconnected nature of reality and shift worldviews away from pure materialism.
To be sustainable, the Foundation will deploy a majority of its capital into for-profit ventures that are unlikely to receive sufficient or appropriate type of support from conventional sources. The Foundation will start with early-stage equity investments and over time may expand to other asset classes including venture debt, revenue-based financing, and private equity.
Despite making for-profit investments, the Foundation will be structured as a 501(c)(3) non-profit and designed to be regenerative at its core. Returns from early cycles will be reinvested so every donated dollar supports multiple Spirit Tech innovations over time and help bring the sector into maturity over the multiple decades.
The intention is for the Foundation to become the basin of attraction for donors who sense that modern technology can serve our collective spiritual unfolding, and who wish to be part of the story of ushering in the next wave of spiritual technologies with wisdom and care.
The Spirit Tech Wisdom Council
Capitalism has driven immense progress and innovation. It remains one of the most powerful forces shaping our culture. But without the right guardrails, it can overwhelm even the most well-intentioned founders and companies.
In most sectors, the growth-at-all-costs incentive model has led to rapid innovation that has been largely a net benefit.
Spirit Tech is different. It will require a more nuanced approach.
The emerging spiritual technologies will play a deeply intimate role in people’s lives. They have the potential to do as much harm as good and will need to built with wisdom and care.
This is where the Spirit Tech Wisdom Council comes in.
Made up of three to seven lineage holders from across wisdom traditions, the Council will exist to help protect the spiritual integrity of the Spirit Tech sector.
The Council’s mandate is to serve as a counterbalance to the pressures of capitalism by building and maintaining an expansive container for Spirit Tech founders to stay true to their spiritual ethos and mission as they scale.
Founders that receive investments from the Foundation will be able to engage the Wisdom Council as an Advisory Board, and can ask a member of the Council to sit on their Board. The foundation will also invite founders to grant a golden share to the Council. Golden shares are non-dilutable veto rights designed to:
Protect founders from forced removal or hostile governance
Minimize mission drift by requiring Council approval for changes to purpose, charter, or exit
Protect end-users from poorly integrated or misaligned product strategies
Self-select capital partners so investors are aligned with values
The Council is not expected to use its veto rights often, and in most cases, only when invited by the founder. Its primary role is to ask clear, grounded questions that help founders find the most integrated path forward during difficult moments on the building journey. The golden share structure is there to give founders confidence that they can maintain the soul of their company irrelevant of the funding path they go on. As the Council builds trust in the broader market, we envision the golden share to become a competitive advantage for Spirit Tech products in the market — a signal of trust in a sensitive and deeply personal sector.
Our aim to design the Golden share in a way that at 75% of the Foundation portfolio companies will choose to participate. Despite close collaboration, the Council be housed in an independent nonprofit, fully separate from the Foundation where Spirit Tech founders will be able to elect and remove Wisdom Council members.
How we approach the early design of the Spirit Tech Council and Golden Share structure will dictate the success of this initiative. That is why we want to co-design the initial structure with Spirit Tech founders and funders.
If you want to be part of this process, let us know by filling out this short 3-minute form.
Foundation’s Role in Ecosystem Building
Spirit Tech is missing many core infrastructure layers needed for a thriving ecosystem.
The Foundation will serve as a critical node in building this infrastructure. We will dedicate a significant portion of our operating budget and 5% of the portfolio to grants for organizations that create the conditions for a flourishing Spirit Tech sector.
Our focus will be across five pillars:
Thought Leadership and Advocacy: Advancing an inspirational vision for the sector and engaging corporate and public partners to support innovators.
Spiritual Philosophy and Frameworks: Helping to develop integrative meta maps that weave wisdom traditions and practices with the latest philosophical insights on whole human development and provide a shared spiritual foundation and language for the sector to build on.
Cultural Narrative and Media: Shaping stories and media that attract talent, resources, and legitimacy to Spirit Tech.
Events and Community: Convenings and networks that cultivate alignment, trust, and collaboration across the sector.
Resources and Tooling: Job boards, databases, directories, governance toolkits, and open-source research to help founders, funders, and seekers navigate the field.
The Impact We Are Building Towards
Spirit is the headwater — the source from which all change flows.
To transform our systems, we must first transform our inner world and shift the frequency from which we create.
We believe modern technology has an important role to play in shifting this frequency. It can meet people where they are, amplify access to ancient practices, and guide the path of development and awakening with care, depth, and wisdom.
It is estimated that the Spirit Tech 2.0 movement introduced spiritual development tools to over 500 million people and initiated a deeper transformational journey for anywhere between 10-50 million people.
We believe Spirit Tech 3.0 can have an even greater impact.
We hold a vision that over the next two decades, a new wave of Spirit Tech tools will support one billion people to delve more meaningfully into a path of ego development and spiritual growth. These tools will guide people through moments of peak expansion and direct communion with the divine, and just as importantly, through contraction, complexity, and the shadows that inevitably emerge. New Spiritual technologies will help people sense-make and build a personalized ecology of practice, integrating wisdom across traditions and supporting every vector of inner development on the path to deeper wholeness.
And not to escape the human experience, but to enter more fully into it. And to remember our inseparable connection with each other, and with spirit itself.
By 2040, the Spirit Tech Foundation will have:
Catalyzed 100 new Spirit Tech ventures with meaningful funding…
That built new technologies that reached 360M+ people…
And supported 36M+ people through deep and lasting spiritual transformation
Matured the Spirit Tech sector and attracted many other sources of capital
Created the infrastructure for capital to flow in without compromising integrity
Developed spiritual innovation playbooks leveraged by other sectors
Calling in Support
We are in the early stages of a long journey.
This vision will require many people to come together around this vision.
We are actively building the co-founding team and recruiting for a Chief of Staff and a Fundraising Lead. We’re also in conversations with potential board members, investment committee members, and Wisdom Council candidates.
If you or someone you know might be a fit for any of these roles, please check out more detailed descriptions on our Careers Page.
Really cool idea whose time has come. Curious if this structure was inspired by the steward ownership model. I've been studying that lately to address what you call soul drift.
I love this. It's an ambitious, pragmatic and well-rounded approach. Looking forward to seeing how this evolves in the near term :)