Dave & Cheryl Duffield Foundation

Dave & Cheryl Duffield Foundation

The Dave & Cheryl Duffield Foundation launched in 2016 in Incline Village, Nevada, but its philanthropic practice reaches back to 1994. That year, Dave Duffield — who had already founded PeopleSoft and would later co-found Workday — created the Duffield Family Foundation with his wife Cheryl. It was renamed Maddie's Fund in 1999 and has since awarded over $300 million to revolutionize companion animal welfare. The couple's current entity consolidates their grantmaking into three streams: expanding veterinary access for pets, supporting disabled military veterans through the Liberty Dogs initiative, and backing local public-service institutions where the founders maintain personal ties. The foundation deploys capital through invitation-only grants to Section 501(c)(3) public charities, avoiding direct contributions to individuals. Its largest single commitment is to Cornell University, where cumulative giving by Dave Duffield now exceeds $550 million across multiple colleges. A $371.5 million pledge and a further $100 million 2025 commitment are establishing the Cornell David A. Duffield College of Engineering. In the companion-animal space, DCDF partners with legacy grantee Maddie's Fund and cites PetSmart Charities data that 50 million U.S. pets lack adequate veterinary care; it directs funding toward rural-community access solutions. On the veterans track, Liberty Dogs is building a dedicated training campus in Reno, Nevada, where participants spend two weeks living and training with a service dog before returning home at no cost. Dave and Cheryl Duffield serve as directors alongside DCDF Co-President Amy Zeifang and director Laurie Peek. The foundation keeps its asset base private, but disclosed deployment signals institutional scale — Cornell alone has received more than half a billion dollars from the family. In 2026, Forbes ranked Dave Duffield #120 on its list of America's top living innovators, and The Chronicle of Philanthropy included the couple on its annual top-50 U.S. donors list. Publicly, the foundation operates from a single office in Incline Village, though its programs have national reach, from the Cornell campus in Ithaca, New York, to the Liberty Dogs site in Reno. DCDF's architecture is unusual in treating a massive university naming gift, a companion-animal welfare overhaul, and a single-constituency veterans service as three lanes inside one foundation rather than splitting them into separate vehicles. The founders' exit wealth came from subscription enterprise software — a repeatable, high-margin business — and the foundation mirrors that long-cycle patience by funding infrastructure (a college, a campus, a national grant program) instead of annual-campaign check-writing. Maddie's Fund remains a separate legacy entity, giving the family a dual operating structure that spans both early-stage animal-welfare innovation and mature, capital-intensive institution building.