Khronos Group revenue: $3,881,427 in 2024, and the first deficit in eleven years

The quick answer

The Khronos Group reported $3,881,427 of revenue and $4,494,282 of expenses for the year ended December 31, 2024, a deficit of $612,855. That is its first loss in eleven years and the largest in the fourteen years of filings on public record. Revenue fell 4.47 percent from the $4,062,985 booked in 2023; expenses rose 12.53 percent from $3,993,673. Net assets closed at $5,685,871, down from $6,218,433.

Two lines did almost all of the work. The line the consortium books its member dues on fell $407,161, or 13.55 percent. Spending on events and meetings doubled, from $398,445 to $795,561, and that single increase accounts for 79.3 percent of the entire rise in expenses.

Khronos publishes no accounts, commissions no audit, and does not even have its statements compiled or reviewed. Its Form 990 is the only public record of any of this.

Why nobody has these numbers

The Khronos Group is the standards body behind Vulkan, OpenGL, OpenCL, SPIR-V, SYCL, OpenXR and glTF. If you have shipped a game, a GPU driver, a CAD tool or an XR headset in the last twenty years, you have shipped against something Khronos wrote. Wikipedia describes it as "driven by over 180 member companies".

Search for its revenue and you get its own homepage, its GitHub organisation, a Wikipedia article, an App Store listing, a Reddit thread and, incongruously, a medical spa in San Antonio and a line of iPhone camera rigs. Not one page on the first results page carries a dollar figure. Wikipedia's article does not contain the word revenue, the word budget, the word financial or the word dues anywhere in it. That is not staleness. It is silence, and it is a fair reflection of the fact that there is nothing to report from the usual places.

There is nothing on khronos.org either. The homepage, the about page, the members page and the legal page carry no link whose address contains the words financial, report, budget, audit or 990. A site-scoped search returns only false positives about memory budgets in Vulkan samples and power budgets in a 2012 conference deck.

The withholding is deliberate and it is documented in Khronos's own papers. Schedule O of both returns answers the disclosure question with a single sentence: "Bylaws and Membership Agreements are available to the public." Financial statements are not mentioned. The standard Khronos contractors agreement goes further, listing among the confidential information a supplier may not disclose "budgets and unpublished financial statements, licenses, prices and costs, suppliers and customers". Khronos's own legal boilerplate calls its financial statements unpublished.

So the 990 is it. The figures below come from the returns as filed with the IRS in XML, fetched from the agency's own bulk archives, and the year-by-year series is mirrored on ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer.

The fourteen-year arc

Khronos has filed extractable financial data every year since 2011. Sorted, the record looks like this.

The asset column is from ProPublica's extraction of the filings through 2023; the 2024 row is from the filed return. Four years are in deficit: 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2024. The 2024 loss is larger than the other three combined, and 2024 is the worst year in the series by a factor of almost five.

The more interesting shape is the run into it. Look at the surplus column from 2020: +$1,452,259, +$1,389,181, +$734,223, +$69,312, -$612,855. Four consecutive years of decline, ending below zero. The first step down is small, a 4.3 percent dip; the three after it are falls of 47.1 percent, 90.6 percent and then straight through the floor. 2023 was not a good year that happened to be followed by a bad one. 2023 was the last rung of a ladder, and it cleared break-even by 1.7 percent of revenue.

The pandemic explains the top of the ladder. Khronos is a body whose costs are overwhelmingly people flying to rooms to argue about specifications. In 2020 its revenue actually rose, to $3,410,359, while its expenses collapsed to $1,958,100, the lowest since 2014. It banked $2.84 million of surplus across 2020 and 2021 largely by not holding meetings. The 2024 return is what the other side of that looks like.

What actually moved

Khronos reports its expenses in ten lines. Here they are, both years, sorted by how much they changed.

Both columns foot exactly to the totals the return reports. Six of the ten lines fell and four rose. Events and meetings very nearly doubled, and on its own it is 79.3 percent of the $500,609 increase in total spending. Development of API standards, at $2,494,199, is 55.5 percent of everything Khronos spent in 2024.

Accounting fees are worth a second look: $3,039 for the year, down from $13,190. That is the entire external accounting cost of a body turning over $3.9 million.

The revenue side moved the other way, and not uniformly.

So the adopter programme grew 17.2 percent and event sponsorship grew 14.3 percent while the dues line fell 13.6 percent. Everything Khronos sells other than membership went up. Membership is 66.9 percent of revenue, down from 73.9 percent a year earlier.

One caveat matters more than any of the percentages above. Khronos files on the cash basis, not the accrual basis. Part XII of both returns has the cash box ticked. Its balance sheet carries no accounts receivable, no prepaid expenses and no deferred revenue at all. That means the dues figure is a statement about cash that arrived between January 1 and December 31, not about what was billed or earned. A large member paying an invoice in early January rather than late December moves this line. A 13.6 percent fall is real money that did not arrive in 2024, and it is not by itself evidence that 13.6 percent of the membership went away.

An organisation with no employees

Khronos reports zero employees. Not a small number. Zero, on both returns, alongside 300 volunteers in 2024 and 150 in 2023.

Part VII lists sixteen people. Every one of them is reported at $0 of compensation from the organisation, $0 from related organisations and $0 of other compensation. That includes Neil Trevett, listed as President at 30 hours a week, and Emily Stearns, listed as Managing Director at 40 hours a week. A full-time managing director at zero.

The zero is genuine rather than an omission, and the return proves it structurally. Every compensation line in Part IX is zero: officer compensation, other salaries and wages, pension contributions, other employee benefits and payroll taxes. That block foots to the $0 that Part I line 15 reports for salaries and benefits. There is no payroll line for a salary to hide in. Trevett's day job, as the first page of any search for him will tell you, is Vice President of Developer Ecosystems at NVIDIA; his Khronos presidency is an elected role at a body his employer is a member of.

What Khronos has instead is contractors, and they are named. The five who received more than $100,000 in 2024:

That is $1,720,554, or 38.3 percent of total expenses, going to five suppliers. The 2023 list totalled $1,660,509, or 41.6 percent. Clearspan, the management company, sits a few minutes from the Beaverton address the return is filed from, which is to say Khronos's registered office is its management contractor's.

Khronos describes this arrangement itself. Its OpenXR process FAQ says "The OpenXR Working Group is allocated an annual budget" which it uses to fund projects "including contracting work" on the conformance test suite, the tutorials, the Monado sample implementation and the input rebinding infrastructure. The working groups get budgets and buy engineering. The tax return is that sentence with numbers attached.

You can watch an acquisition happen inside a tax return

Compare the two contractor lists and one name changes. In 2023 the largest supplier is Mobica Ltd, of Wilmslow in the UK, paid $697,401. In 2024 it is Cognizant Worldwide Limited, of London, paid $785,921.

Cognizant's own page for the business records that "In March 2023, Mobica was acquired by Cognizant". The FY2023 return, covering a year that began two months before that deal completed, still uses the Mobica name. The FY2024 return uses the acquirer's. The relationship did not change and the money went up 12.7 percent; only the letterhead moved.

The other change is a departure. Jon Leech, paid $169,858 in 2023 for specification editing, is not on the 2024 list. The number of contractors above $100,000 fell from six to five.

The reserve, and where the money actually went

Net assets ended 2024 at $5,685,871 against $4,494,282 of annual spending. That is 1.27 years of cover, about 462 days, down from 568 days a year earlier. By the standards of a trade body that is comfortable rather than alarming, and it is worth saying plainly: a consortium that can run a year and a quarter on its reserves is not in trouble.

There is also nothing to net off. Total liabilities at year end were $3,908, which is 0.07 percent of assets. For a membership organisation billing annually in advance, the complete absence of deferred revenue is unusual, and it is a direct consequence of the cash basis.

The balance sheet is where the year gets interesting. Assets fell $532,292, and they fell in one place:

• Cash, non-interest-bearing: $1,274,943 down to $458,136, a fall of $816,807, or 64.07 percent
• Savings and temporary cash investments: $351,835 up to $351,873, a change of $38
• Publicly traded securities: $4,595,293 up to $4,879,770, a rise of $284,477

Khronos funded the deficit out of its current account and left its portfolio alone, where it gained. The organisation's operating cash fell by nearly two thirds in a single year while its investments grew. That is a decision, not an accident, and it is the single most legible thing in the return.

The roll-forward in Part XI closes exactly, both years. For 2024: $6,218,433 opening, minus the $612,855 deficit, plus $79,976 of unrealised investment gains, plus a $317 item that Schedule O describes as "Adjustment to Net Assets = $317", gives $5,685,871. To the dollar. The 2023 roll-forward closes to the dollar too, with a $1 item Schedule O simply calls "Rounding".

Two things in the paperwork worth knowing

The dues are on the wrong line, and it is why every summary of Khronos says contributions. Form 990 Part VIII splits contributions into named lines. Line 1a is "Federated campaigns". Line 1b is "Membership dues". Khronos reports $2,596,843 on line 1a and nothing at all on line 1b.

A federated campaign is a United Way-style workplace giving drive. Khronos does not run one. It is a 501(c)(6) business league whose own Schedule O says "Membership is voluntary and open to all per the terms of the Membership Agreement", listing six member categories, and whose own OpenXR FAQ asks the reader "How are my Khronos membership dues and Adopter fees used?" and answers that "all Khronos membership dues and Adopter fees are reinvested into Khronos standardization activities". The organisation says it has membership dues. The return reports zero on the membership dues line.

The tax effect of this is nil, because lines 1a through 1f add into the same total. The effect on legibility is not nil at all. Every summary built from the return's headline categories reports $2.59 million of "contributions" for an organisation whose revenue is overwhelmingly corporate subscriptions, and the $841,500 of adopter fees sits in a different section of the form entirely under the description "Adoption of API standards".

Schedule D existed in 2023 because of two dollars. The schedule list changes between the two returns: 2023 files Schedule D, 2024 does not. Opening 2023's Schedule D, the entire schedule is one row. The description is "Rounding". The amount is $2. In 2024 that $2 cleared, the other-liabilities line went to nothing, and the schedule went with it.

What the return does not settle

Foreign spending is reported two ways and they do not agree. Schedule F puts total foreign expenditure at $135,508 in 2024, split between Japan at $13,878 and a region the return calls Brussels at $121,630, all of it described as "Mktg/Member Outreach". In 2023 it was $171,433 across Canada, the United Kingdom and Japan. Yet Part VII shows $1,366,918 paid to contractors in the United Kingdom and Hungary in 2024, and the United Kingdom does not appear in Schedule F that year at all.

Both readings are defensible. Schedule F Part I asks about activities conducted outside the United States, and a US organisation buying engineering from a foreign supplier is not obviously conducting activities abroad. Khronos evidently treats its contracted engineering as domestic procurement and reports only marketing and member outreach as foreign activity. That is a classification judgement, not an error, and the two schedules are answering different questions. But a reader who takes Schedule F as a measure of how international Khronos's spending is will be out by an order of magnitude.

One number is not derivable and should not be published. With $2,596,843 of dues and Wikipedia's "over 180 member companies", the average works out to roughly $14,000. That figure is meaningless. Khronos's six membership categories, Promotor, Contributor, Academic, Associate, Individual and Non-Profit, are priced very differently, Khronos publishes no fee schedule, and the academic and non-profit tiers are not comparable to a promoter seat. An average across them describes nobody. It is not in this piece for that reason.

And there is no audit to check any of it against. Both returns answer no to whether the financial statements were audited, and no to whether they were compiled or reviewed by an independent accountant. There is no second document. Where a reconciliation against an audit would normally go, there is nothing, and the $3,039 accounting bill tells you why.

The bottom line

Khronos Group had a bad 2024 by its own standards and a perfectly survivable one by anyone else's. It lost $612,855 because its member-dues receipts dropped by $407,161 and it spent $397,116 more on getting people into rooms. It paid for the gap out of the current account, cutting its cash by 64 percent while leaving a $4.88 million portfolio untouched, and it ended the year with 462 days of cover.

The interesting question the return raises is not solvency. It is concentration. A body with zero employees, whose largest single supplier bills $785,921 through a company that did not exist under that name two years ago, and whose second, third and fifth largest suppliers are also engineering firms, has outsourced the production of some of the most widely deployed API specifications in computing to five vendors and a management company. That is a legitimate and probably efficient way to run a standards organisation. It is also not what most people picture when they think about who writes Vulkan.

The 2025 return is not filed. The IRS index for returns received in 2026 contains no row for this organisation, so the figures above are the most recent that exist anywhere.