Who funds them, what they fund and how to apply.
The Global Innovation Fund is a nonprofit, impact-first investment fund for social innovations improving the lives of underserved and vulnerable people. Its latest published application window closed January 15, 2025; the fund says future calls will be posted after review.
Mozilla Open Source Support's Foundational Technology track funded open-source software that Mozilla relies on in its products, infrastructure, or internal work. MOSS has been on indefinite hiatus since the 2020 Mozilla restructuring and is not accepting applications.
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.
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.
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.
Inaugural OS4LS RFA of the Open Source for Science Fund. LOI due 2026-06-08; full proposals due 2026-07-21. Submissions are closed. Award notifications expected October 2026.
A recurring Optimism grants mission that funded Superchain growth through the Grants Council. Season 9 submissions closed May 20, 2026. The Grants Council was later dissolved; there is no public Season 10 window as of 2026-08-29.
Principles of Intelligence runs PIBBSS as a three-month interdisciplinary AI safety research fellowship for about 20 researchers. The Winter 2026-2027 Cape Town cohort closed applications on 20 July 2026. The program page is collecting expressions of interest for later cohorts.
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.
A season-based Decentraland funding program for small open-source projects that can ship within 90 days. Season 1 offered up to $15,000 in MANA for mobile content and AI-assisted builder tooling; applications closed April 24, 2026. No later season has been announced.
EUR 10M Horizon Europe cascade-funding programme led by NLnet with FSFE and other partners, offering EUR 5,000-50,000 R&D grants with rolling calls every two months (2026-2030) plus a scale-up track, across open-tech sovereignty/privacy, internet resilience, environmental impact, and supply-chain transparency. NLnet currently describes the fund as being set up; the first recorded call is closed and the next window is not yet confirmed on the Restack page.
Retroactive funding for projects built on Avalanche C-Chain and Avalanche L1s, run in recurring tracked rounds; community leaderboard voting is advisory, the Avalanche Foundation makes final award decisions.
Schmidt Sciences' Science of Trustworthy AI program funds technical research to understand, predict, and control risks from advanced AI systems, across three aims: characterizing/forecasting misalignment in frontier models, developing generalizable measurement and intervention, and overseeing superhuman-capability and multi-agent systems. Awardees also receive compute, software engineering support, and frontier-model API credits. Funded in two tiers (up to $1M; $1M-$5M+ over 1-3 years) across sub-tracks including "Understanding Safety in AI Systems" (23 awards) and "Inference-Time Compute" (10 awards).
A Sia Foundation funding program for open-source tools and applications supporting user-owned data. Intake for new proposals was paused on June 25, 2026 through the end of Q3 while the Foundation completes a long-term program strategy; approved projects continue during the pause.
Annual bounty-driven contribution event for open-source quantum software, open to developers worldwide. UnitaryHACK 2026 ran 3-17 June and has closed; the 2027 event is not yet announced.
Status describes whether a program is running. Application methods are recorded separately. Read the funder’s terms before applying.