Summary
Our founding team spent years in the nonprofit sector, where we saw first hand how easy it was for brilliant researchers and program managers to lose weeks to tangled bookkeeping, inefficient recruitment processes or complicated legal advice. We set out to support high-impact organizations to overcome their main bottlenecks and unlock their capacity to do good, and the answer was simple: it was the operational foundation underneath it.
Three years later, Impact Ops is a holistic operations support agency for high-impact nonprofits. We handle the parts of running an organization that determine whether it survives long enough to make impactful progress on its mission. We focus on providing industry leading finance, recruitment, and operational support that enables an organization to flourish. Our clients span cause areas such as AI safety, animal welfare, climate change and global health. We’ve helped dozens of teams build the backbone they needed to survive their first year, and grow well past it. We remain a fully independent, financially sustainable, purpose-first organization with a team of 20 specialists behind it.
At this 3 year point we want to share our impact story in numbers: the year on year growth, the sectors we are supporting, the services we are providing. Beyond the numbers we also wanted to share some of the stories of who we’ve helped, the problems they were facing and what we’ve built for them, and where we’re taking things next. We hope this will help others who may be in a similar position.
There is a lot more to share, in terms of lessons, learnings and future plans. We’ll be posting more frequently in the coming months, but for now here is our 3 year impact report in numbers!
Recruitment: more hires, wider reach
This is the team that runs hiring rounds for our clients, not for us. Every hire is someone we sourced, screened, and placed into one of the organizations we support, filling a role that would otherwise have sat open or eaten months of an organization’s time.
In 2023, the year of our inception, we made our first 6 hires with no formal pipeline, just the founders running the process themselves alongside everything else. It’s grown every year since: 31 hires in 2024, 53 in 2025 (a 71% jump), and 50 already this year with four months still to go, putting us on pace for over 80 hires, a 50% year on year jump. Behind each of those numbers is an organization now able to do the work it exists to do because a seat that mattered got filled well.
Since we started tracking placements by cause area in 2024, AI safety and governance has been our biggest category, and global health and development has been the one that moved the most: from zero hires in 2024 to 16 in 2025 to 14 already this year, without coming at the expense of AI safety and governance, which has held steady at around 11 to 12 hires a year.
Nearly 40% of everything we place sits in Operations or Programs & Regional Delivery, the roles that keep grant reports going out on time, seminars actually happening, and applications getting reviewed.
The client relationships tell their own story. We’ve supported 32 organizations with our recruiting service line since inception and more than a third of those clients have come back to us across multiple years instead of restarting a search from scratch elsewhere.
Our client testimonials speak for themselves.
“We have been collaborating with Impact Ops for almost a year, supporting us with our recruitment activities. Working with Impact Ops truly feels like having an extension of our own team. The relationship feels mutual, constructive, and collaborative, rather than like working with a distant external consultant. From the beginning, they were flexible and cooperative, supporting us quickly during a period of significant capacity constraints and ambiguity. We established an effective collaboration very quickly, and they have always been open to feedback and willing to adjust and optimise their ways of working to meet our needs. They demonstrate ownership, loyalty, commitment, and accountability.”
– Good Food Institute, APAC
“Impact Ops ran the outreach for our Head of Operations search and put candidates in front of us we would never have reached on our own. They arrived with the scoring matrix, skills assessment and interview guides ready to go, ran the screening and reference calls, and advised us at every decision point. We hired someone excellent. As a very small team looking to scale, we couldn’t have got there in the time we had.”
– Vista Institute for AI Policy
Operations Infrastructure: depth and focus
This is the team that takes projects from zero to one. The entity set up process gets an organization legally established, keeps its risk exposure in check, and builds the systems underneath its day-to-day work. It’s also the hardest of our three teams to summarize in a few numbers, because the work is so varied. We set up 5 entities in 2023, 9 in 2024, and 13 in 2025, and we’re on pace for 18 this year, a growth rate that has more than tripled since we started.
AI safety organizations have made up the steady majority of that work every year, but the range around them keeps widening to include effective giving groups, biosecurity initiatives, research organizations, and global health and development nonprofits. Some of these were established organizations spinning out of a fiscal sponsor and some were brand-new entities standing up from scratch.
Alongside entity setup, our systems and due diligence work has grown at a similar pace. Since 2024, we’ve delivered 49 systems across our client base, and applicant tracking systems have made up half of that work on their own. The rest spans ops and task management tools, CRMs, grant management systems, and due diligence infrastructure, reflecting how differently each organization’s operational gap shows up once you actually get under the hood. A handful of engagements were scoping only, where the right call was to map the problem clearly rather than build something an organization didn’t yet need.
“We couldn’t have started Topos UK without Impact Ops, and are incredibly grateful for the continuing support! Highly recommended!”
– Topos Institute
“I am so impressed with Impact Ops team – they’ve made us a higher-functioning organization and for that, I am immensely grateful!”
– Food Policy Pathways
One of our additional service lines, due diligence, is all about assessing the risks associated with the individuals and organizations our clients intend to partner with, whether that’s a donor, a grantee, or a board member. Ethical expectations around business practices keep rising, and any suggestion of poor governance can damage a client’s reputation, so we treat due diligence as an essential precursor to any significant transaction. This year that included a large-scale project for The Earthshot Prize, where we systematically vetted potential prize winners by conducting comprehensive background checks, to give the client complete peace of mind. It’s not the most visible part of what we do, but it is one of the clearest ways we let our clients focus on their mission instead of on background checks.
Finance: scaling up the machinery
Since our first year of operating we’ve seen an 8x increase in active finance clients in just over three years.
The client count is one part of the story, but what it’s actually saving these organizations is the part we care about more. Across the first half of this year, our finance team saved over 1,800 hours of work on behalf of clients, averaging about 100 hours a year per client. And this might well be an underestimate due to underreporting. By using cutting edge finance tools, we are increasing the productivity of each hour of finance support provided by our team.
We’ve also gotten sharper about the tools underneath the work, bringing in Ramp for US clients and Apron for UK clients, and we’re early adopters of new platform providers. This means we are at the front of understanding the newest developments and can build long lasting partnerships.
One example we are particularly proud of: A policy advocacy organization came to us that needed to stand up almost overnight. We helped them pick and open the right bank and investment accounts, got their accounting system of record running properly, and untangled a complicated related-entity structure. By the time we were done, they’d also come through the audit of their first year of operations without any surprises. This type of work might not sound very glamorous, but it’s exactly the type of support an organization needs to scale efficiently.
“We now have a near real-time understanding of our financial position thanks to Impact Ops. They have built us an automated dashboard that provides informative insights on our fund balances and runway for our various funds. This has freed up our capacity to focus on mission-relevant work. I believe other projects in a similar position would strongly benefit from Impact Ops’ finance support.”
– Centre for Long-Term Resilience
Over a third of the new finance clients we’ve signed since the start of 2025 work directly on AI safety or existential risk, on top of the AI safety clients we already had. The field has grown fast, and these organizations need an efficient operational backbone to allow them to scale efficiently so they can focus on the important problems they are working on.
What we’ve learned this year
Something we’ve come to appreciate this year is the need to keep growing so that we can continue to provide a high quality service to the growing number of high-impact organizations we support. Recruitment, finance, and operations infrastructure have all scaled at once this year, and staying ahead of that, rather than reacting to it, has been the real test.
We’ve also learned that retention rate tells you far more about the quality of the work than any single engagement can. The Centre for Long-Term Resilience has been a finance client of ours since May 2023, longer than anyone else, and has also come back to us for a hiring round in 2024, 2025, and 2026. When a client keeps returning across different services and different years, that says a lot more than one good placement or one clean month of books ever could.
Come build with us
We want to keep leaning into fast-moving areas like AI safety while continuing to grow the rest of our client base alongside it. We’re also expanding what we offer, with AI upskilling and cyber security support, both areas we’ve been exploring as the next additions to our service lines. If you are interested in our services, get in touch with us.
Underneath all of it, we’re still funded entirely through the partnerships we have with our clients, not by grants. That means we, as a team, get to decide what to prioritize and we don’t need to be a draw on grantmakers’ time or money.
We prize team and culture fit highly. We’ve kept growing every year, with new people joining us from a diverse range of backgrounds. Our team spans the globe, from Guatemala to the Philippines, and we come together twice a year for our team retreats. Everyone at Impact Ops is self-driven, proactive, and genuinely excited about the organizations we support.
If that sounds like a good fit, we’d love to hear from you. Please explore our open roles; if you don’t see an immediate match, consider joining our Talent Pool, which we regularly review as new opportunities arise. If you’d prefer to discuss other ways to collaborate, feel free to reach out to us anytime at hello@impact-ops.org. We’re always keen to connect and explore new possibilities together.