The internet's missing trust layer — and the coordinated capital that builds it.
Weave funds a cohort of builders to converge on shared community-trust protocols — and requires interoperability as a condition of the money. It is the convergence layer that turns a scattered field of aligned projects into shared infrastructure the movement owns.
gold ⟨…⟩ = number to confirm before this page goes live.
The problem
The movements building the next economy — civic tech, Indigenous data sovereignty, bioregional regeneration — all depend on the same missing thing: a trust layer underneath their tools. Personhood without surveillance. Communities that count as actors, not just sets of individuals. Trust that travels between systems. No single project can build it alone, and today's platforms are structurally hostile to it — their business models run on capture.
The result is well-funded fragmentation: a dozen good projects, each with an incompatible approach, real value, no commons. The integrations between them never get built, because that work benefits everyone and no one owns it.
Why now
The systemic-investing field has independently diagnosed the gap: it is caught in a pre-scaling trap, and explicitly calls for four to five new "financial backbones" — coordinators, not more projects. At the same time the First Person Project personhood stack has reached enough maturity to anchor the rest of the protocol work. The convergence window — an aligned cohort, a maturing anchor protocol, and a field asking for exactly this role — is open now and does not stay open.
What your capital does — Time, Energy, Money
Time
Compresses years of manual, per-relationship trust-building into protocol rails that scale across community boundaries.
Energy
Stabilises builders already in flight so their effort compounds into shared infrastructure instead of burning out in isolation.
Money
De-risked by design: value comes from interoperability, not lock-in, so adoption compounds across the ecosystem rather than depending on one company's enclosure.
The ask
Six streams run in parallel — each makes the others stronger. Streams A–C are philanthropic (grants and contracts through fiscal sponsorship); Stream D is aligned, non-extractive investment capital; E and F emerge as the substrate matures.
| Stream | Year-1 ask |
|---|---|
| A · Fellowship Phil | $XXXk |
| B · Protocol contracts Phil | $X.XM |
| C · Groups cohort Phil | $XXXk |
| D · Canal Funds Inv | $X.XM |
| E · Substrate at scale Inv | Yr 2+ |
| F · Compost capital Inv | Yr 2+ |
| Year 1 total | $X.XM |
You are not being asked to take the first bet. Kevin Triplett self-funded the baseline work — team, interviews, strategy — before asking anyone else in. The invitation is to join him, not to go first.
What Year 1 must demonstrate
Not a report a funder reads — a moment a funder witnesses. Cohort projects running the shared stack as working software; cross-project bridges proving the weave is real (a credential from one project recognised in another); and a public demonstration of real communities on real infrastructure — small numbers, real stories, verifiable. That demonstration is the stage gate that unlocks the next phase.
Who's building it
Kaliya Young (co-chair) — 24-year arc across three generations of digital identity, founder of the Internet Identity Workshop. Kevin Triplett (co-chair, founding funder) — self-funded the baseline, two years of relationship-building. Plus program management, QA/interoperability (endorsed by W3C DID co-editor Drummond Reed), knowledge architecture, and narrative. See the traction & proof → · Full team →
Governance & where the money sits
Philanthropic streams (A–C) flow through a fiscal sponsor. Stream D — the Canal Funds — is aligned, non-extractive investment capital: a distinct pool from the philanthropic side, thesis-aligned but not Weave-controlled. Protocols are public goods, held as commons — not enclosed as anyone's private property. How we're governed & what we won't do →
You've understood the thesis. Let's talk specifics.
Vehicle, staging, your fit.
Start a funder conversation →