OPEN SOURCE FOR THE LIFE SCIENCES - OPEN SOURCE FOR SCIENCE FUND

Skip to content SearchClose The application portal is now open Apply Now Download PDF Funding Details $250,000 over 2 years (Track 1: Domain-specific Tools) $1,000,000 over 2 years (Track 2: Foundational Libraries and Ecosystem Initiatives) Key Dates • Applications open (LOI) May 11, 2026 (9 am PDT / 4 pm UTC) • Letters of intent due June 8, 2026 (2 pm PDT / 9 pm UTC) • Applications open (full proposals) June 23, 2026 (9 am PDT / 4 pm UTC) • Full proposals due July 21, 2026 (2 pm PDT / 9 pm UTC) • Notifications sent October 2026 • Opportunity • Eligibility • Application Requirements • Selection Process • Reporting and Progress • Policies and Terms • Contact • Changelog • The Open Source for Science Fund invites letters of intent from developers and maintainers of open source software projects that underpin AI and data-intensive research in the life sciences. This program will fund technical advances and address significant bottlenecks in software tools with demonstrated community adoption in the life sciences, allowing them to unlock new capabilities for scientists worldwide and evolve functionality to meet the demands of AI-native research environments. _This is a two-step application process: an initial Letter of Intent (LOI), followed by invitations to a select number of applicants to submit a Full Application._ Opportunity Overview Open source software has fueled every major scientific discovery of the last two decades. In the life sciences alone, breakthroughs spanning the genomics revolution, protein structure prediction, the real-time tracking of pathogen evolution and spread using genomic sequence data, or the AI-driven identification of novel drug candidates all share a common: they were all fundamentally enabled by open software tools and technology. Yet while scientific practice races toward agentic workflows, autonomous labs, and AI-driven discovery, the open source infrastructure that powers this work, and the maintainer communities who keep it alive, remain systemically underfunded and not yet designed for AI-native use. Many foundational tools were built around manual, step-by-step workflows and need modernization to work with agents, support data-intensive pipelines for model training, inference, and evaluation, or evolve to represent, structure, and efficiently process very large datasets. The Open Source for Science Fund is a multi-donor initiative by Renaissance Philanthropy that pools philanthropic and industry capital to sustain and evolve essential scientific software for the AI era. With seed funding from Biohub and Wellcome, and support from the Kavli Foundation, the Fund builds on the track record of the Essential Open Source Software for Science (EOSS) program — six cycles, $58M deployed across 230+ projects — as a successor initiative that is operationally independent and purpose-built to scale. About this call “Open Source for the Life Sciences” (OS4LS) is the inaugural call of the Open Source for Science Fund. It is targeted at open source software that underpins data-intensive research and AI-driven discovery in the life sciences. Applications are invited for work that 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. For this Request for Applications, we seek to support domain-specific software tools across a broad range of disciplines in the life sciences. We also welcome proposals focused on foundational libraries and software dependencies as well as collaborations among related projects within the same software ecosystem. Scope and application tracks We’re seeking proposals in these two categories: Track 1 — Domain-specific Tools Available funding: Up to $250,000 USD total over two years (up to $125,000 USD/year) Open source tools for representing, analyzing, and visuali