macrogrants

Text (415) 516-3509
team@macrogrants.com

California nonprofit·501(c)(3) pending

We fund cool projects, fast. Grants from $500 to $25,000, approved in a day or two, plus we'll help with the work itself. Text us!

We're here to help with fundraising, technical work, introductions, logistics, or getting attention on something you build. macrogrants is operated and funded by builders like you.

If you have a project that should exist, email us or text us at (415) 516-3509 with a short description. There's no application form. We'll respond as fast as we can.

Our first grant program is Claudestronomy (or Codexstronomy, or Grokstronomy, depending on your orientation), tokens + GPU credits + community for people using AI agents for astronomical research with public sky archives.

Want to help fund this? We take donations to macrogrants or to specific projects. Giving and status.

Programs

  • An ASCII star field

    Claudestronomy

    Grant program · $50,000

    Grants, compute, and model credits for people using AI agents to find new things in public sky data + a community group around it. Open to anyone, from first-timers to professional astronomers. We're happy to help you validate your results. Apply for a grant!

  • The Wright Flyer leaving the ground at Kill Devil Hills, December 1903

    Unemployment Labs

    Research group (in formation)

    A loose group of people hacking on frontier research projects together. Some are unemployed, others are full-time researchers/engineers building on the side. Generally self-funded; but we back some of the projects with money, compute, and introductions. Invite only. Researching something cool? Email us.

Also in the works: The Bets, an event where top researchers, investors, and academics get together to make bets about AI and the world in 2035, and give to charity. Details to come, follow our mailing list for more info.

What we'd like to fund

We'll fund basically anything cool, pretty much regardless of size, focus, or importance. From websites, to archaeological digs, to city-wide scavenger hunts, we're probably interested.

What gets us most excited, though, are projects where progress is some function of dollars: where more compute, more scans, more tokens, more hours, directly leads to more results. While most of our checks are small at first, macrogrants is setup to scale up funding aggressively to make great things happen.

Why? There's nearly an unlimited amount of money, compute, and tokens in the world. Instead, most of the hard work is really just making problems soluble in them. The second an exciting project is some f(dollars) or f(tokens), it's trivial to find the resources for it, and macrogrants is built to help with that.

On culture: Our members are usually a bit mischievous, 'chaotic good'. We like projects that route around whatever's in the way of a good thing happening, and we're happy to fund things that are a little edgy or on the line. Great science from non-traditional places, really wild 'big if true' ideas, or activist projects really get us going.

Formally, we fund science, education, and general projects with a public benefit. Grants can be any size, but typically run from about $500 to $25,000. Some things don't fit inside a nonprofit: for-profit initiatives, political work, or projects too far over the line for a 501(c)(3). We can't fund those from macrogrants, but we're happy to match you with people who'll give without the deduction (Will is always down).

Getting started

Email team@macrogrants.com or text us at (415) 516-3509 with a short description of what you want to do. A rough budget or a link to something you've built helps, if you have one.

If you don't have a project but want to contribute your time to something cool, consider joining our collaborator group. To keep it high-signal, it's by light application, but don't be scared off by that: just shoot us an email or a text with who you are, what you're interested in, and a sample of things you've built. We love connecting contributors to new efforts and maintain a mailing list for when opportunities come up.

There's also a group chat with all the grantees, team members, advisors, and donors, and we're planning a yearly retreat in California for grantees, donors, and everyone making this happen. Get involved!

What our members have built

These are projects people on this team led before macrogrants existed. They weren't funded by macrogrants, but they're exactly the kind of thing we want to see more of.

  • Luke Farritor’s black-and-white First Letters Prize submission showing recovered Greek letters

    Reading the Herculaneum scrolls

    Luke Farritor · 2023–24

    Luke used machine learning to find the first readable word inside a scroll carbonized by Vesuvius in 79 AD, then shared the Vesuvius Challenge's $700,000 grand prize for recovering over 2,000 characters. Nature, Smithsonian.

  • The survey plane's wing over unbroken jungle canopy in Central America

    The Pan-American Lidar Initiative

    Mehran Jalali · 2025

    When the Maya left their cities, the jungle grew back over them, so they're invisible to satellites and hidden in thick jungle. Mehran flew a plane with a lidar scanner over 1,000+ km² of Central America to map the ground under the canopy, and found 10,000+ buried structures. TBPN.

  • The Jmail logo, a Gmail-style M wearing a straw hat

    Jmail

    Luke Igel & Riley Walz · 2025

    Luke & Riley took the publicly released Epstein records and put them searchable and readable in a familiar Gmail interface. Used by congressional offices to review the files. Over 450M visits. Wikipedia, New York Times.

  • Percy, the stick-figure mascot of Pursuit

    Pursuit

    Riley Walz & friends · 2024–26

    A free, month-long scavenger hunt across San Francisco made by 15 friends. Thousands of people play every summer, running all over the city to find clues and finish quests. KQED, CBS, SFist.

  • Purple plasma glowing inside Hudzah’s fusor chamber

    A nuclear fusor in the kitchen

    Hudhayfa “Hudzah” Nazoordeen · 2024

    Hudzah assembled a nuclear fusor during a 36-hour kitchen livestream, with the help of Claude, working through missing parts and equipment failures to produce plasma. He documented the build and what he learned along the way. Read his account.

  • Smoke rising over the water in an image from Citrini Research’s Strait of Hormuz field report

    A field trip to the Strait of Hormuz

    Analyst #3 · 2026

    For Citrini Research, Analyst #3 took a speedboat into the Strait of Hormuz during the war. He spoke with Iranian smugglers and Omani fishermen, watched tankers pass through with their trackers off, and brought back a firsthand account of what was moving through the strait. Read the field report.

What we're inspired by

  • PlasticList. A small team backed by Nat Friedman wanted to know how much plastic is actually in the food we eat, so they paid labs to test nearly 300 everyday foods for 18 plastic chemicals and put the results online. They found abnormally high levels of plastic chemicals in 86% of samples.
  • The Vesuvius Challenge. The Herculaneum scrolls, carbonized by the Vesuvius eruption in 79 AD, had been impossible to read since they were dug up in the 1700s. In 2023 Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, and Brent Seales put up over $1 million in prizes, released the scans, and had everyone share their code. Less than a year later three students, including Luke, read over 2,000 characters from inside one.
  • The NanoGPT speedrun. Keller Jordan started an open leaderboard for training a small GPT-2 as fast as possible on 8 GPUs, and people have been beating each other's records ever since, from 45 minutes in 2024 to now under 40 seconds. Also, Keller invented the Muon optimizer for it, which is now used to train frontier models. A really fun example of open, crowdsourced research making real progress.
  • Fast Grants. In April 2020, Tyler Cowen, Patrick Collison, and Patrick Hsu started giving COVID researchers grants with a short application and an answer in days instead of months. They gave out over $50 million in about a year, including early funding for Yale's saliva test. Macrogrants is very much inspired by the Fast Grants approach.

People

More team members coming soon.

Giving

Will DePue is seeding macrogrants with the first $50,000, for the astronomy program. We're looking for significant donations, to macrogrants or to specific projects. If you'd like to create a bounty for a certain project, we'd love to accommodate. Email team@macrogrants.com and we'll arrange it directly.

Status · October 13, 2026

macrogrants is a California nonprofit public benefit corporation, incorporated October 10, 2026. Our application for 501(c)(3) recognition was filed with the IRS on October 13, 2026 and is pending. Under IRS rules, recognition applies retroactively to our incorporation date, so donations made while the application is pending are tax-deductible once it's granted.

macrogrants supports science, education, and public-benefit projects. Information about our revenue, expenses, administration, and fundraising is available on request by email or at 2108 N St Ste N, Sacramento, CA 95816, and we provide it within seven days.

Macrogrants Foundation is the operating name of macrogrants, a California nonprofit public benefit corporation.