Laude Institute Moonshot Program

Laude Institute, backed by a $100M+ commitment from Databricks and Perplexity co-founder Andy Konwinski, runs Moonshots, a competitive research grant program for AI projects aimed at humanity's hardest problems. Its first competition, Moonshots // ONE, drew 125 proposals from 600+ researchers and deployed $4.1M in seed grants across 25 teams ($250k to 8 winners, $200k to 4 runners-up, $100k to 13 honorable mentions), with seed winners competing for at least one $10M lab to be decided in October 2026. Tracks cover accelerating science, healthcare, workforce reskilling, and civic discourse, and winning projects commit to sharing their work as open source.¹