OPEN SOURCE FOR SCIENCE FUND LAUNCHES TO POWER AI-DRIVEN DISCOVERY - OPEN SOURCE FOR SCIENCE FUND

Skip to content SearchClose New multi-donor fund by Renaissance Philanthropy seeded by Biohub and Wellcome opens first call for proposals, with letters of intent accepted beginning May 11 SAN FRANCISCO. May 4, 2026. Renaissance Philanthropy today announced the launch of the Open Source for Science Fund, a new multi-donor philanthropic fund dedicated to sustaining and evolving the open source software stack that underpins science. Seeded with $20 million in anchor funding by Biohub and Wellcome and support from The Kavli Foundationand the Research Software Alliance,  the fund aims to invest in the open computational foundations of science, and the communities behind them, with an initial focus on the life sciences. The fund launches with an inaugural Request for Applications. Proposals are invited from software project contributors and maintainers whose work supports data-intensive research and AI-driven discovery in the life sciences. Letters of intent will be accepted beginning May 11, 2026. Fueling the invisible infrastructure science runs on Every major scientific breakthrough of the past two decades has depended on open source software. From accurate protein structure prediction to AI-driven drug discovery, the common thread is an ecosystem of open source tools and libraries, built and maintained by scientific communities. Yet while scientific practice races toward agentic workflows, no-code interfaces, and AI-driven discovery, the open source infrastructure—and the maintainer communities who keep it alive—remain systemically underfunded and not yet designed for AI-native use. Research software is evolving rapidly and foundational tools need modernization to interoperate with agents, support data-intensive applications and model training, and scale with growing computational demands. • “From imaging the universe to modeling life at the molecular scale, science is built on open source software,” said Dario Taraborelli, Director of the Open Source for Science Fund. “As we enter an AI revolution across many fields of science, the computational foundations of every scientist’s work remain open source and need to be funded. Traditional science funding mechanisms are a poor fit for the needs of software projects and the communities that maintain them. This fund exists to change that, by bringing together funders from across the private and public sector to fuel the next decade of scientific discovery.” • A coordinated, multi-donor fund The fund aims to pool philanthropic, public, and industry capital into shared infrastructure for grantmaking, reducing duplication and enabling funders to act collectively at a scale that no single organization can achieve alone. Hosted by Renaissance Philanthropy, the fund builds on the six years of trailblazing investments by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s Essential Open Source Software for Science (EOSS) program, the world’s largest dedicated investment in scientific open source software. Over six funding cycles, EOSS deployed $58M across over 230 software projects, pioneered a first-of-its-kind multi-funder model, and demonstrated that coordinated philanthropic investment in open source could deliver measurable impact at scale. The Open Source for Science Fund is built and designed by the team behind EOSS, with lessons from that program built into its structure, review process, and impact assessment approach. Participants in the kickoff event of the EOSS program (Berkeley, California, 2020) • “The Essential Open Source Software for Science program proved that sustaining the software beneath science matters as much as funding the science itself. The Open Source for Science Fund carries that lesson forward at exactly the right moment — when AI is reshaping scientific discovery and the infrastructure supporting it needs to keep pace. Biohub is proud to help seed what we hope becomes a lasting, shared foundation for science.” – Patricia Brennan, Vice President, Technology and General Manager, Science, Bi