Confluens Foundation

Architecture for coordinated capital, intelligence and continuity

Confluens is a lean and flexible AI-augmented enabling architecture that supports coordinated ocean funding without replacing existing actions or strategies.

Explore our mission

The Mission

The Confluens Mission

Oceans underpin planetary stability, food, health and energy systems, trade, economic growth, and resilience. Yet ocean funding continues to underperform relative to need. Capital is pledged and initiatives are launched, but funding often arrives late, in isolation, or without continuity. As a result, gaps persist, policy windows close before funding can align, and promising efforts struggle to move beyond pilot phases.

The issue is not lack of ambition or expertise, but the absence of structures that allow funding to act coherently over time. This structural challenge has surfaced repeatedly across philanthropic dialogues, public processes, and funder-led initiatives.

The constraint is architectural. Without shared intelligence, trusted alignment spaces, and practical coordination mechanisms, funding continues to arrive in bursts rather than as coherent, long-term capital pathways that support policy and impact.

About

What is Confluens?

Confluens Foundation is a lean and flexible AI-augmented enabling architecture created in response to this need. It connects funders, science, public institutions, business and other actors along clearer pathways for coordinated funding, by strengthening, connecting, and scaling what already exists rather than replacing it.

Confluens operates as a service-oriented enabling layer for the ocean funding ecosystem. It supports philanthropic, public, and private capital in different ways and at different moments, helping translate shared ambition into coordinated capital pathways while leaving funding decisions and governance with participating institutions, unless they explicitly choose pooled or delegated mechanisms.

Philanthropy is uniquely positioned to host this function. The work requires neutrality, continuity across political cycles, and the ability to convene across mandates without capture. Conditions that public and private actors cannot credibly provide alone. Philanthropy can steward enabling architecture that allows capital to move flexibly across regions, themes, and capital stacks where it is most needed.

Significant ocean commitments already exist. Without shared architecture for intelligence, alignment, and orchestration, these resources remain fragmented. Confluens offers funders a way to translate ambition into coordinated capital flows, accelerate joint action, and ensure that today’s commitments generate long-term system impact – by strengthening how the system works, not by replacing it.

What changes if Confluens exists

Funders see earlier and together where priorities, gaps, and complementarities sit, before strategies are set and calls are launched.

Alignment happens upstream, shaping direction and sequencing rather than relying on retroactive coordination.

Capital pathways are designed and sustained over time, enabling continuity.

Philanthropic, public, and private capital reinforce each other intentionally, without requiring uniform strategies or mandatory pooling.

Ocean actors reuse a replicable coordination architecture, avoiding one-off processes.

Core Pillars

Enabling capabilities

OceanMatcher

Voice of the Ocean and REV Ocean, together with eleven global philanthropic foundations, co-developed OceanMatcher, an AI-enabled intelligence layer created by funders for funders. OceanMatcher1 maps projects, actors, themes, geographies, and funding interests, making the field visible, revealing gaps and overlaps, and strengthening strategic decision-making and convening. It functions as an enabling capability supporting alignment, portfolio design, and capital-stack development.

The primary objective of Ocean Matcher is to improve ocean funding and impact through intelligent matchmaking, utilizing advanced technologies such as language models, machine learning, and other relevant techniques.

Ocean Matcher v1.0 seeks to achieve the following outcomes:

Easy to use: Help philanthropic organisations find relevant ocean innovations and science projects through an intuitive web interface.

Secure and stable: Match scientists, innovators, and philanthropists with a scalable platform, smart algorithms, and advanced security.

Scalable database: Collaborate with trusted partners to grow a database of high-quality projects and innovation ideas.

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Funders Forum

The Funders Forum is an invitation-only, modular and flexible global architecture, designed to service the needs funders and investors. It enables capital owners and providers to align capital, learning, risk and foresight in complex fields where continuity, coordination, partnership, design, and timing determine whether initiatives scale or stall.

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Foundations dialogue

The Ocean Decade Foundations Dialogue is an informal network of more than 35 philanthropic funding organizations working together to explore how best to create the partnerships and funding models that will underpin the enabling environment for the Ocean Decade. By engaging in this global and highly visible UN-led initiative, philanthropic funding organizations are able to create new collaborations and partnerships and thus have a greater impact than by working alone. Rather than being bystanders to the process, they have the opportunity to shape the strategic implementation of the Ocean Decade.

Philanthropic funding organizations are an essential partners in addressing the multiple issues compromising ocean health and resilience. Flexible and responsive, they can act as advocates and conveners, invest in innovative activities to test new approaches, and catalyze collaborative efforts and initiatives with governments and a wide range of partners including industry and civil society.

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