Our Mission
We are a multi-funder initiative to support and evolve the open source stack that underpins science
A Renaissance Philanthropy initiative, the Open Source for Science Fund builds coordinated funding mechanisms and shared analytical tools for the software funder community, enabling capital to reach the software that matters most. We help maintainers of research software find reliable support to grow their projects and meet the demands of AI-driven scientific workflows and practices.
What makes our model unique
The fund was built by people who’ve spent years investing in the scientific open source ecosystem. We know that maintaining software is real work, that community health matters as much as code, and that open source cannot be funded like research. Our programs have been shaped and informed by the leaders who build and maintain the world’s most critical software for science. We treat software as a first-class fundable output, and the people behind it as its foundation.
Coordinated funding
Rather than building programs in silos, we pool capital from philanthropic, public, and industry sources into shared funding opportunities. This lets us invest across more of the open source ecosystem, minimize duplication, and make high-leverage investments.
Maintainer focus
Our programs are designed around how open source software actually works. We support community growth and governance alongside technical development — and we measure success by what matters to the people who build tools that serve the scientific community.
AI readiness
We help widely adopted tools and emerging frameworks with strong community traction evolve to support data-intensive workflows and AI-driven science, from agentic support and hardware acceleration to data formats that enable model training.
Impact-oriented
We invest in software that addresses the bottlenecks that matter most to scientific communities, and build tools and measurements to surface its impact, so every grant tells a story and funding is grounded in evidence.
Built by the team behind the world’s largest philanthropic program to fund scientific open source
$
58
Million
Deployed via Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Essential Open Source Software for Science program
230
+
Projects
Software projects funded and supported
6
Cycles
Number of funding cycles since 2019