Having a diverse user base means we have diverse funding sources, too. Our goal is to continue diversifying our funding. To inquire about sponsorship, please email giving(at)torproject.org.

Thank you to all the people and groups who have made Tor possible so far, and thank you especially to the individual volunteers who have made non-financial contributions: coding, testing, documenting, translating, educating, researching, and running the relays that make up the Tor network.

Active Sponsors

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Tens of thousands of individuals like you

Donations from individuals allow us to easily allocate resources to emergent events that require our response. This is extremely important for our work providing essential safety to people in volatile locations.

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Open Technology Fund

OTF strives to support technology-centric solutions for anyone affected by censorship, surveillance, and internet blocking in order to protect fundamental human rights. These projects are used to provide an end-to-end solution for USAGM web content to be distributed in censored or surveilled areas, to provide increased circumvention services in response to ongoing government censorship in Iran, and to increase Tor connection to users in Turkmenistan by increasing the capacity of bridge connections that are harder for the government to block.

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Sida - Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency

Sida is a government agency working on behalf of the Swedish parliament and government, with the mission to reduce poverty in the world. Through their work and in cooperation with others, Sida contributes to implementing Sweden's Policy for Global Development.

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Fastly

Fastly's global edge cloud platform processes, serves, and secures applications as close to users as possible, at the edge of the network. Fastly generously hosts our Tor Browser update downloads that can be fetched anonymously.

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U.S. Department of State Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor

The Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor leads the U.S. efforts to promote democracy, protect human rights and international religious freedom, and advance labor rights globally. DRL is currently supporting the Tor Project to: (1) empower communities in the Global South to bypass censorship, (2) rapidly expand access to the open internet, (3) make the Tor network faster and more reliable for users in the Global South, (4) measure and respond to internet censorship, and (5) reduce malicious relay activity and improve the health of the Tor network.

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Craig Newmark Philanthropies

Craig Newmark Philanthropies was created by craigslist founder Craig Newmark to support and connect people and drive broad civic engagement. The organization works to advance people and grassroots organizations that are getting stuff done in areas that include trustworthy journalism, voter protection, gender diversity in technology, and veterans and military families. The organization has provided Tor Project with an unrestricted gift.

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DARPA via Georgetown University

DARPA's Resilient Anonymous Communication for Everyone (RACE) program researches technologies for a distributed messaging system that can: a) exist completely within a given network, b) provide confidentiality, integrity, and availability of messaging, and c) preserve privacy to any participant in the system. This contract supports our work to develop, integrate and analyze a suite of obfuscated channels to support RACE goals for varying adversarial networks.

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National Science Foundation via Georgetown

The National Science Foundation funds research and education in most fields of science and engineering. This contract supports building a novel Anonymous Communication Experimentation (ACE) software framework and developing a user interface, a toolkit to model inputs and visualize outputs, and a data repository to share and archive results.

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Google Summer of Code

Google Summer of Code is a global program focused on introducing students to open source software development. Students work on a 3 month programming project with an open source organization during their break from university.

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Zcash Community Grants

The Zcash Community Grants (ZCG) program (formerly known as ZOMG) funds independent teams entering the Zcash ecosystem to perform major ongoing development (or other work) for the public good of the Zcash ecosystem. Zcash is a privacy-focused cryptocurrency, which pioneered the use of zk-SNARKs. The Zcash ecosystem is driven to further individual privacy and freedom. ZCG is funding a project to create an implementation of the Tor protocols in Rust (called “Arti”). In the current phase of the project, ZCG is supporting Tor to to implement onion services for responder anonymity & make Arti a viable replacement for most users of the C tor client.

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Ford Foundation

The Ford Foundation is an independent, nonprofit grant-making organization. For more than 80 years it has worked with courageous people on the frontlines of social change worldwide, guided by its mission to strengthen democratic values, reduce poverty and injustice, promote international cooperation, and advance human achievement. The Ford Foundation has made a general support grant to the Tor Project.

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Sloan Foundation

The ALFRED P. SLOAN FOUNDATION is a not-for-profit, mission-driven grantmaking institution dedicated to improving the welfare of all through the advancement of scientific knowledge. Established in 1934 by Alfred Pritchard Sloan Jr., then-President and Chief Executive Officer of the General Motors Corporation, the Foundation makes grants in four broad areas: direct support of research in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and economics; initiatives to increase the quality, equity, diversity, and inclusiveness of scientific institutions and the science workforce; projects to develop or leverage technology to empower research; and efforts to enhance and deepen public engagement with science and scientists. The Sloan Foundation has made an unrestricted, general operating grant to the Tor Project.

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International Republican Institute

The International Republican Institute (IRI) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, nongovernmental organization committed to advancing democracy and freedom worldwide. IRI has supported civil society organizations, journalists, democratic governments and other democratic actors in more than 100 countries since 1983—in Africa, Asia, Eurasia, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East, and North Africa. The IRI Technology and Democracy team works in every region of the world to help grassroots actors turn digitization and the technological revolution into a force for democratic progress, and build their capacity to deploy digital technologies in ways that advance transparency, inclusion, accountability, responsiveness, and citizen engagement, while adjusting to a changing threat landscape. IRI is funding a project which aims to localize Tor Browser, Tor circumvention tools, Tor documentation and training materials, and a Tor-based file sharing tool called OnionShare into Arabic, Chinese, and Swahili. Tor will also create localized demonstration videos on using Tor, circumventing censorship, and using OnionShare.

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#StartSmall

#StartSmall is Jack Dorsey’s philanthropic initiative to fund global crisis relief, girls health and education, and open internet development. Dorsey transferred $1 billion (28% of his wealth) to #StartSmall in 2020. #StartSmall has made a general support grant to the Tor Project.

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FUTO

FUTO is a software lab and a grant and investment fund that is dedicated to the development of open-source software that returns control of technology back to the people. The fund has provided Tor Project with an unrestricted grant.

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Omidyar Network

Established by philanthropists Pam and Pierre Omidyar, Omidyar Network is a social change venture that has committed more than $1 billion to innovative for-profit companies and nonprofit organizations since 2004. Omidyar Network works to reimagine critical systems and the ideas that govern them, and to build more inclusive and equitable societies in which individuals have the social, economic, and democratic power to thrive. Omidyar is supporting a project for Tor to provide advocacy organizations, coalitions, and community groups with real, user-generated, easy to understand stories about the day-to-day importance of encryption in order to strengthen these organizations’ advocacy and educational efforts.

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Open Society Foundations

The Open Society Foundations, founded by George Soros, are the world's largest private funder of independent groups working for justice, democratic governance, and human rights. Open Society approaches this mission through the illuminating principles of justice, equity, and expression-defining characteristics of any truly open society. The Open Society Foundations support Tor's work to deliver three digital safety and security trainings to human rights defenders, activists, journalists, former detainees, and the families of these communities in the MENA diaspora.

Past Sponsors

This sponsors page is based upon un-audited and un-reviewed financial and in-kind donations, contract, and other data.

Further details about our audited and reviewed funding can be found with our Financial Reports.