Supporting individual researchers doing science for the public good
Up to $10,000 in AI usage credits & compute, for up to 10 individual researchers. $100,000 total.
Run by @thekellycrit · Applications open on a rolling basis · Apply here →
We're at a strange, exciting moment. A single researcher with generous rate limits on frontier models and a modest compute budget can now do work that used to take a lab — including making real progress on longstanding open problems.
The cost of unlocking that person is trivial compared to the value of what they might find. That's an asymmetric bet on public science, and Kelly Grants exists to make it ten times.
No institution required. No equity, no IP claims, no strings — just do great research and share it with the world.
Funded: research for the public good with genuine scientific merit. Mathematics, natural sciences, AI research, and adjacent fields. Independent researchers, students, professors moonlighting on a side question, self-taught obsessives — the work matters, not the credential.
Not funded: private or commercial work. If the primary output is a product, a trading edge, or anything that stays behind closed doors, this isn't the right program.
The one hard condition: significant results must be shared publicly — arXiv, a public repo, a detailed writeup, whatever fits the field. Public science means public.
The application takes about 10 minutes: who you are (links preferred over résumés), 1–3 things you've built, proven, or discovered, and roughly 300 words on what you'd do with the sponsorship.