About us

Spectacularly good futures are within reach. We just have to mind the gaps.

About Convergent

We created Convergent in 2021 as a non-profit to bring together founders and funders to design, launch and operate Focused Research Organizations (FROs) that build critical infrastructure to bridge gaps in the landscape of scientific progress.

Our FROs develop new fundamental capabilities, removing bottlenecks to breakthrough technology and proving out a new operating model for science. Filling in the space left by academia, corporate labs, startups, and government R&D, FROs are delivering public goods that would not be produced any other way.

Since 2021, we’ve secured almost $400m in funding from 30+ individuals and institutions to launch almost a dozen subsidiary FROs, which benefit from ongoing critical operations and governance support from Convergent.

If you're interested in covering Convergent Research in your research, writing, or other reporting, please reach out through the contact link in our footer and see our media kit here.

The Kennedy Space Center Firing room during the launch of Space Shuttle Discovery Hubble Space Telescope deployment Mission STS-31.

Roadmapping

At Convergent, we believe that directed inquiry can reveal the critical chokepoints that are holding back progress across entire branches of science and technology. But without deliberate agenda-setting, the scientific community’s attention and funding often disperse across many interesting but low-leverage topics.

Roadmapping is how we surface high-leverage projects, and it can look like many different types of surveying and map-making, from convening workshops to commissioning technical roadmaps and pipeline analyses, from literature reviews to competitions.

Central to every roadmapping exercise are catalytic questions: Which technologies could unlock progress across multiple domains? What constraints define what’s possible today? Could those constraints be bypassed entirely? And if we had no resource or coordination limits, what should we attempt? When we bring together the right ecosystem to answer these questions, the results are often greater than the sum of their parts.

Scientific philosophy

Many of today’s most important scientific problems don’t fit neatly into existing institutions. They’re not exploratory research questions for a university lab, and they’re not near-term profit focused enough for startups or industry. Building solutions for them requires coordination across fields, sustained and high-level engineering effort, and a focus on long-term public benefit.

Solutions to these problems look like: large-scale open datasets for biology, tech that greatly reduces the cost of mapping the brain’s circuitry or analyzing proteins, scalable platforms for climate research, formal mathematics and other key areas.

Like our FROs, we strive for focus and work backwards from the beneficial futures we want to inhabit. We weigh problems by the impact we believe they could have on humanity, and focus on building solutions that would not otherwise exist.