Funder: Renaissance Philanthropy
Due Dates (Anticipated): June 2027 (Letters of intent) | July 2027 (Full proposals)
Funding Amounts: Life sciences call: up to $250,000 (Track 1) or $1,000,000 (Track 2), over two years
Summary: Supports open source scientific software development, maintenance, and technical advances for data-intensive research and AI-driven discovery.
Key Information: Grants go to organizations, not individuals; independent projects need an eligible institutional home or fiscal sponsor.
Description
The Open Source for Science Fund is a multi-donor initiative hosted at Renaissance Philanthropy and seeded by Biohub and Wellcome. It supports the development, maintenance, and evolution of open source infrastructure for science, rather than AI models themselves. Its broader interests include data representation and curation, large-scale analysis and visualization, numerical computing and simulation, hardware acceleration, and autonomous workflows.
The inaugural Open Source for the Life Sciences call targets established software with demonstrated community adoption. It funds work addressing significant technical bottlenecks or delivering critical capabilities, including domain-specific tools, foundational libraries, and collaborations across related projects. Priorities include preparing scientific data for model training, enabling agentic workflows, improving scalability and hardware acceleration, and making tools interoperable in AI-driven pipelines. Existing use in AI applications is not required.
