About the Fund
The Open Source for Science Fund (The Fund) is a multi-donor philanthropic fund hosted at Renaissance Philanthropy. It pools capital from philanthropic and industry funders to sustain and evolve open source software that is essential infrastructure for AI-driven and data-intensive scientific discovery. The fund backs technical development, maintenance, and community growth for widely used open source tools, with a particular focus on software that needs to evolve to natively support AI workflows and large-scale data pipelines.
The Fund builds on the track record of the Essential Open Source Software for Science (EOSS) program, which was run by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative across six funding cycles between 2019 and 2025, deploying $58M in funding across 230+ projects. The Fund is operationally independent from CZI and purpose-built to scale, pooling capital from multiple funders, running coordinated calls for proposals, and expanding the scope and reach of that earlier work. Read more about our history.
The Fund is led by Dario Taraborelli, a program architect and grantmaker who previously led the Open Science portfolio at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (including the EOSS program). Read more about our team and scientific advisors.
The Open Source for Science Fund is an initiative by Renaissance Philanthropy. Renaissance Philanthropy is a nonprofit organization with a mission to fuel a 21st-century renaissance by increasing the ambition of philanthropists, scientists and innovators. The organization designs time-bound, thesis-driven funds led by field experts and inspires talent to take action through playbooks and communities. Learn more at www.renaissancephilanthropy.org.
The Fund was seeded at launch by Biohub and Wellcome, with additional support from the Kavli Foundation, and the Research Software Alliance. For a full list of our funding, institutional, and industry partners, see https://os4science.org/about/funding-partners/ .
For Partners
The Fund’s initial focus is on open source software that underpins AI-driven and data-intensive discovery in the life sciences. We will expand its portfolio to other areas of science as our network of funding partners grows and new scientific communities are served.
We offer several options for partnership:
- Core Funder: Shape the fund’s strategic priorities and direct funding to the software that matters most.
- Fund Supporter: Contribute to a growing coalition of funders, access shared data on the evolving scientific open source ecosystem, and learn alongside other partners.
- Industry/Institutional Partner: Bring in-kind resources and expertise and help connect open source projects we fund with the broader ecosystem.
Interested in discussing partnership options? Get in touch at info@os4science.org or visit https://os4science.org/contact/.
As a partner organization, you will help shape a strategic portfolio — influencing funding priorities, focus areas, and review criteria toward the scientific domains you care about most. By partnering with the Fund, you will:
- Make high-leverage investments without the overhead of building and running a grant program yourself
- Participate in strategy discussions and portfolio reviews
- Access the full corpus of submitted proposals, including vetted but unfunded applications, providing a landscape view of the field’s current capacity and gaps
- Track how funded software moves science forward, following the discoveries, publications, and breakthroughs our grants enable
- Join grantee convenings, technical workshops, and community events hosted by the Fund
- Be recognized as part of a growing coalition of partners across all fund communications and public materials
The Fund maintains shared processes and infrastructure for running calls for proposals, identifying expert reviewers, collecting key metrics, conducting diligence, and selecting proposals for funding.
The Fund supports multiple mechanisms for making and managing grants. Participating funders can decide to run and manage grants through the Fund or leverage their own grantmaking mechanisms. We offer different models to support your needs as a partner.
For Applicants
No, we support domain-specific software tools across a broad range of disciplines, foundational libraries that serve as core dependencies, and collaborations across a set of related tools within the same software ecosystem.
While existing evidence of use in AI applications is not a requirement for software projects seeking funding, we will prioritize specific aspects of AI enablement, as detailed in individual calls for proposals, including but not limited to:
- Representing, managing, curating, and structuring scientific data for use in model training
- Developing benchmarks and standards, endpoints, or protocols that unlock the use of open source tools in agentic workflows
- Scalability and performance improvements, including support for hardware acceleration
- Interoperability frameworks that make tools composable in AI-driven pipelines
For more information about what’s in scope for individual calls and eligibility criteria, please check our current funding opportunities.
Yes, we aim to expand the fund’s portfolio to other areas of science based on the priorities of future funding partners, and will announce additional calls for proposals beyond the life sciences on the website. The initial focus of the fund is on software that enables data-intensive research and AI applications in the life sciences, a high priority area of investment for our seed funders.
Yes, maintenance and community-focused activities such as documentation improvements, community engagement, and contributor development are fundable activities as long as the proposed work addresses significant technical bottlenecks or delivers critical capabilities in these software projects. We seek proposals that target a clear technical challenge that serves critical needs for a research audience, a realistic plan of work aligned with the project’s own roadmap, and genuine buy-in from the core maintainer community about the proposed fundable activities. The Fund does not support pure maintenance grants not tied to specific outcomes or deliverables.
Yes. The Fund supports projects and teams globally, and we particularly encourage applications from international teams building software that has significant global adoption. Applications will be considered from international organizations, provided they are compliant with applicable U.S. laws and regulations. Please review details on individual calls for proposals for specific eligibility criteria.
The Fund supports domestic and foreign nonprofit and for-profit organizations, public and private institutions, including colleges, universities, hospitals, laboratories, units of state and local government, companies, and eligible agencies of the federal government.
At this time, the Fund runs competitive calls for proposals, including our inaugural request for application on Open Source for the Life Sciences. We currently do not fund unsolicited proposals outside of these calls. Additional funding opportunities will be announced on the website when they become available.
No. Grants are only made to organizations, not individuals. Projects without an institutional home must designate a fiscal sponsor (such as NumFOCUS or Code for Science & Society).
Projects applying for funding must be open licensed and have a publicly available codebase in a repository. Proprietary software or software with usage restrictions (e.g. “for noncommercial use only”) or restrictive licenses are not eligible for funding. Projects that include code under copyleft licenses are eligible to apply for funding as long as all new code developed through the grant is open licensed through a permissive license.
Yes. Software libraries that are openly licensed and maintained through a public code repository and with open source practices, but run on proprietary or semi-proprietary engines or platforms, are eligible to apply for funding.