Who funds them, what they fund and how to apply.
The Mozilla Technology Fund (MTF) gave awards of up to $50,000 plus a 12-month mentorship cohort to open-source projects tackling a themed public-interest technology challenge each round. The latest sourced cohort is the 2024 AI and Environmental Justice round; no later public call is on file.
🛠️ Build with IBM watsonx Orchestrate. 📘 Earn IBM SkillsBuild badges. 🏆 Compete for $10K in prizes. The NCCU AI Hackathon March 19–20, 2026 Open to all university students.
NSF FINDERS FOUNDRY announces planning grants for K-12 educators, technologists, researchers, and parents/guardians to develop and scale evidence-based tools for an AI-driven future. Eligible teams may apply for planning grants to prepare for larger implementation projects. The deadline is May 27, 2026.
Small grants to help NumFOCUS's fiscally sponsored and affiliated open-source scientific computing projects improve usability, grow their communities, and speed release cycles. Calls for proposals normally run 3x/year; applications are currently closed while NumFOCUS updates its financial and administrative systems.
Cloud/hardware/software research grants (e.g. up to 30,000 H100 80GB GPU-hours, RTX PRO 6000, or DGX Spark units) for full-time faculty at accredited PhD-granting institutions, across simulation & modeling, AI training, and AI inference/agents/systems software. Currently not accepting new applications.
Milestone-based funding framework for the Obol Collective across three tracks: contributor work on Obol Collective SQUAD Goals, retroactive funding for community workshops/meetups/onboarding sessions (proof of attendance), and open research/technical contributions advancing distributed staking. Grants are issued in OBOL tokens negotiated at USD-equivalent value; applications went through Questbook with no fixed deadlines while live. Per Obol's own docs, the program is currently paused.
The Open Source Initiative announced a new fellowship at UN Open Source Week to bridge open source practices and global AI policy, sponsored by organizations including Google and Red Hat. OSI is absent from the org registry.
Multi-donor fund administered by Renaissance Philanthropy, seeded with support from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Biohub, and Wellcome Trust, funding open-source software infrastructure for science. The inaugural 2026 OS4LS call is closed. The apply page shows no open opportunities as of 2026-08-29.
The OpenAI Foundation's AI Resilience program funds work in bio-resilience, cyber-resilience, AI model safety, and research on AI's effects on young people. As of June 1, 2026, the Foundation said it was finalizing more than $130 million in grants and had not announced a public application route.
Season 7 contribution program for Optimism governance operations. Core contributors and trainees supported voting cycles, governance communications, documentation, onboarding, and Retro Funding while an open bounty system funded discrete community tasks.
Optimism Grants Council Cycle 28 allocated a remaining 15,000 OP budget through Season 6 mission requests and introduced a Token House-approved audit mission process. The cycle has ended and is retained as a historical governance funding round.
Optimism Grants Council Season 6 funded mission requests for Superchain growth, developer adoption, experimental applications, and subsidized smart-contract audits. The season concluded in November 2024 after receiving 91 applications and approving 22.
Optimism Grants Council Cycle 49 awarded multiple grants, including a Growth Grant to ArcadiaFi for automated liquidity management, one-click concentrated liquidity positions, leverage, and yield optimization on Optimism Mainnet. The full Cycle 49 report detailing all awarded projects is available at https://gov.optimism.io/t/cycle-49-grants-council-report/10630.
Optimism's experimental demand-led grants track for Season 4. Eight requests defined work the ecosystem needed across data tooling, contract interfaces, audits, RPC services, academic research, token-bound accounts, and interoperability; 72 proposals produced 17 funded finalists.
OpenStreetMap Foundation's 2020 Microgrants pilot helped volunteers overcome financial barriers to OpenStreetMap work. The official program page identifies it as the 2020 project; later board discussions have not established a new public intake under this program.
Polygon Ecosystem DAO Season 1 introduced a community bounty program for contributors to claim tasks and earn rewards for completed work. This early ecosystem program has concluded and is retained as a historical round.
Polygon Village's 2023 grants format funded projects building on Polygon. This historical program was later succeeded by the Polygon Community Grants Program.
Protocol Labs Research funds goal-driven and open research advancing distributed systems, cryptography, networking, and web3/crypto-networks (the technologies behind IPFS, Filecoin, and related projects), via topic-specific RFPs, a wildcard RFP-X, open research awards, and fellowships (e.g. a $60k PL Research Doctoral Fellowship; Cryptonet network grants of ~$25k-$35k). Individual RFPs are reviewed on their own schedules. The general Open Research Grants program has been paused since early 2023.
Status describes whether a program is running. Application methods are recorded separately. Read the funder’s terms before applying.