Koch Foundation

Koch Foundation

Carl and Paula Koch founded the Koch Foundation in 1979 in Gainesville, Florida, creating a vehicle to direct their personal wealth toward supporting Roman Catholic evangelization. The foundation's mission focuses on establishing and strengthening Catholic communities in areas with limited access to the Church, including rural missions, developing regions, and territories where the Catholic presence is nascent or fragile. After the founders' passing, operational leadership shifted to the Bomberger family, with William A. Bomberger serving as President and Matthew A. Bomberger chairing the Investment Committee. The foundation's investment strategy spans private equity, direct co-investments and SPVs, distressed debt, fund of funds, natural resources, private credit, secondaries, and startup-stage venture capital. Its portfolio reaches across North America, South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, Oceania, the Caribbean, and the Middle East and Central Asia. The investment committee pursues a multi-manager approach, blending buyout, growth equity, mezzanine, and early-stage commitments with a willingness to engage in turnaround and special-situations deployments. Confirmed holdings remain undisclosed, consistent with the foundation's low public profile. The foundation reports roughly $109 million in assets, managed by a lean governance structure (Altss estimate). In addition to its Gainesville headquarters, the foundation holds cash equivalents and commercial real estate in the same location. The Koch Foundation maintains a Candid Silver Seal of Transparency, signaling baseline public accountability. In 2023 or 2024, Andrew LoFaro was appointed Executive Director, succeeding Carolyn Young, who had led the foundation for several decades — a generational leadership transition that pairs a new executive with the Bomberger family's continued board oversight. The foundation's structural differentiator lies in its integration of a sophisticated, multi-asset-class endowment investment program with a narrowly defined religious mission. Unlike large secular foundations that pursue broad social mandates, the Koch Foundation deploys a private-investment playbook — direct co-investments, distressed credit, natural resources, and venture capital — exclusively in service of Roman Catholic evangelization. This creates an unusual governance tension: an investment committee operating with the toolset of a family office endowment must reconcile opportunistic, risk-aware capital deployment with grantmaking constraints tied to a single religious purpose.