Open Source for Life Sciences Fund
- Organization: Renaissance Philanthropy
- Type: Grant
- Deadline: July 21, 2026
- Funding: Fully Funded
The Open Source for Science Fund is a multi-donor funding initiative that pools money from philanthropy, government, and industry to support open source software infrastructure for scientific research. It was seeded by Biohub and Wellcome and is managed by Renaissance Philanthropy. The fund backs development, maintenance, and evolution of open tools that power data-intensive research and AI-driven discovery, covering areas like large-scale data analysis, numerical computing, hardware acceleration, and autonomous workflows. The core idea is that open source software is foundational to modern science, from mapping the universe to modeling molecules, yet it's chronically underfunded and wasn't built to handle the demands of AI-era science like petabyte-scale data and agentic workflows. The fund offers two main entry points: funding opportunities for open source maintainers and projects, and a pathway for organizations to become funders themselves. If you work on scientific open source tools or represent an institution looking to invest in this space, this fund is designed specifically to connect those two sides and make coordinated, strategic investment possible.
