Visa Foundation Commits $2 Million to U.S. Small-Business Support Networks in First Domestic RFP

Visa Foundation Commits $2 Million to U.S. Small-Business Support Networks

Visa Foundation, a separately constituted corporate foundation, announced on 30 September 2026 a $2 million commitment to fund entrepreneurial support organizations (ESOs) serving small businesses across the United States — marking the foundation's first U.S. Request for Proposals since its inception.

The initiative targets 501(c)(3)-registered ESOs and is structured to distribute between $100,000 and $250,000 to each recipient, with grant size calibrated to the scale and scope of the applying organization. Visa Foundation expects to select up to 12 organizations in total.

What the Grants Are Designed to Do

According to Visa Foundation's announcement, the funded programs are intended to help small business owners build skills, access capital, adopt new technologies, and pursue growth. The foundation cited U.S. Small Business Administration data indicating that small and medium-sized businesses represent more than 98 percent of U.S. enterprises — framing the grant program as a response to the outsized role these businesses play in the domestic economy.

ESOs function as intermediaries between individual entrepreneurs and the broader support ecosystem, providing training, mentorship, and access to practical resources that many small business owners would otherwise struggle to obtain independently.

The foundation's $2 million commitment targets up to 12 U.S. organizations, with individual grants reaching as high as $250,000 — a domestic-first move for a foundation whose historical grant record spans 60 countries.

A Domestic Turn for a Globally Oriented Foundation

The announcement represents a meaningful shift in geographic emphasis. Visa Foundation's historical grant record, spanning 60 countries, reflects a predominantly international focus — a pattern now being extended, for the first time through a formal RFP mechanism, to U.S.-based intermediaries.

The foundation's cumulative commitments through September 2023 totalled $200.5 million: $80 million in grants across 50 organizations and $120.5 million in investments across 24 organizations. That activity is reported to have supported more than four million small businesses in 60 countries and over one million jobs, figures corroborated by the foundation's inaugural Impact Report, released on 20 March 2024.

Kelly Mahon Tullier is identified as Visa Foundation Board Chair in the March 2024 Impact Report press release.

Historical Context: The 2020 Commitment

The current announcement builds on a significant prior commitment. In April 2020, Visa Foundation committed $210 million directed at small and micro businesses globally — comprising $10 million in COVID-19 emergency relief and a five-year, $200 million commitment focused on financial inclusion and small-business resilience. That 2020 pledge established Visa Foundation's position as a significant institutional actor in the SMB philanthropic and impact-investing space.

Why It Matters

The framing of this RFP around skill-building, capital access, and technology adoption reflects a broader set of pressures on small businesses, including the accelerating pace of digital transformation. By channelling funding through ESOs rather than directly to individual businesses, Visa Foundation is betting on the multiplier effect of intermediary organizations — entities with existing relationships, local knowledge, and programmatic infrastructure already in place.

For ESOs themselves, institutional grant programs of this type — structured, competitive, and backed by a named corporate foundation — can provide multi-year operational certainty that project-by-project funding rarely offers. Whether a $2 million pool distributed across up to 12 organizations is sufficient to move the needle at scale is an editorial question; what is verifiable is that the foundation has identified ESO capacity-building as the mechanism through which it believes small-business outcomes can be improved in the U.S. market.

The RFP process, open to 501(c)(3) ESOs, has not had its application deadline confirmed in the primary sources reviewed for this article. Prospective applicants should consult Visa Foundation's official channels directly for eligibility and submission details.