Stephen Hawking announced the Breakthrough Initiatives program on the 20th of July 2015 at London's Royal Society. Yuri Milner provided the funding to make this vision real and the program aimed to last for at least ten years.
Breakthrough Listen began its operations with one hundred million dollars in dedicated funding in January 2016. The project utilizes the Green Bank Observatory and the Parkes Observatory to scan the skies for artificial signals while employing the Automated Planet Finder to observe visible light from distant targets.
The Breakthrough Message program launched a competition offering a prize pool of one million US dollars. Participants sought to design a digital message representative of both humanity and planet Earth without transmitting any signal until a global debate occurred among high-level science and political leaders.
Pete Worden leads the Breakthrough Starshot project which was announced on the 12th of April 2016 as a one hundred million dollar effort. Each probe named StarChip weighs only several grams yet travels at twenty percent the speed of light using ground-based lasers reaching up to one hundred gigawatts.
NASA signed a collaboration agreement with Breakthrough Initiatives in September 2018 to explore Saturn's moon Enceladus. This mission concept aims to study plumes ejecting from the moon's warm ocean beneath its southern ice crust where the ice shell measures between two and five kilometers in thickness.