Rockefeller Foundation (founded 1913) sell themselves as a major philanthropic foundation created by John D. Rockefeller (and family). It frames itself as using science and technology to “solve humanity’s toughest problems.” It funds public-policy work, grants and technical projects, and explicitly supports “digital public goods” and data stewardship initiatives.
This is the money-and-legitimacy layer on steroids. The Foundation doesn’t just bankroll "helpful" tools; it seeds the entire market and launders technical pilots into policy diktats. They underwrite digital-public-goods projects and data-stewardship pilots that build the backend plumbing for national ID and cross-sector data linkage, then use those “successful” pilots as market proof that a single credential is necessary. Fund a pilot, manufacture favourable evidence, hand the results to friendly experts, and package the outcome as an international best practice that governments can’t ignore. Philanthropy here acts as venture capital for civic infrastructure: it de-risks experiments for private vendors, primes suppliers, and primes governments to accept the finished stack as inevitable. The result is not accidental innovation but deliberate market-making - technical trials that become technical standards, and standards that become administrative compulsion.