Submit ideas

Convergent Research is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.

We bring together scientific founders and funders to design, launch and operate Focused Research Organizations (FROs) across a range of fields. Our FROs, build pivotal infrastructure that bridges gaps to breakthrough scientific research, proving out a new operating model for science that enables a high level of team science and systems engineering for public goods creation. Since our founding in 2021, we've secured almost $400 million in funding from 30-plus individuals and institutions.

Our team comprises scientists and technical experts with combined experience at MIT, Caltech, Neuralink, DeepMind, Amazon, Oxford, Harvard, and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Yes! We gladly accept FRO idea submissions at any time. Please use this form.

We start by performing systematic technical roadmapping research to identify bottlenecks to progress in key scientific fields. This roadmapping takes the form of targeted investigations conducted with world-leading scientists, workshops to bring together diverse perspectives on the challenges facing specific scientific fields, fellowships and competitions for whitepapers, and other methods. We also solicit abstracts for FROs through broad, open outreach to scientists and other interested researchers.

Our team initially evaluates incoming few-page proposals at a high level, with targeted outreach to domain experts and iterative follow-up conversations with the proposers as needed to ensure their idea is a potential fit for an FRO.

We then assess whether there is potential interest from a funder in our network for the FRO idea. If a project has sufficient funder interest, we help the FRO founding team incubate the idea.

Convergent Research does not fund FROs directly. We attempt to match proposed FROs and their founding teams with members of our network of potential funders.

Once a potential funder is identified for a proposed FRO, we guide the prospective FRO’s founding team in writing an extensive technical proposal, including defining the specific milestones they intend to achieve in their project and their plans for technology transfer. These proposals are extensively reviewed and improved, typically in collaboration with world experts in the relevant scientific fields.

Yes. We regularly consult with experts on specific risks, and have already ruled out incubating 3-4 potential FROs due to risk considerations (such as having too much downside potential alongside its potential benefits).

The FRO model is applicable to many fields of science. We are currently incubating FROs in climate measurement, mathematical theorem proving, materials science, and other areas.

The first set of FROs launched were biology-focused mainly because of the biology expertise present in Convergent Research at the time of its founding, but we have since expanded and continue to expand our purview.

Academic labs excel at open-ended discovery but are often ill-suited for capital- and teamwork-intensive systems engineering projects. Academic incentives revolve around the creativity of individual scientists as reflected by publications and grant funding rather than the productivity of large teams over relatively long periods of time.

Government agencies, national labs, or other large scientific institutions often undertake pivotal, high-capex scientific projects, but can take a long time to respond to rapidly emerging scientific opportunities in a focused, concentrated way. Launching these projects also requires coordinating and influencing large bureaucracies, an opportunity not available to every team with a good idea.

ARPA-style programs coordinate distributed teams based at existing organizations, each working on their own sub-project, whereas each FRO is a new, dedicated organization, focusing on a single project. See also this explanation (https://spec.tech/library/fros).

Startups face market and investor pressure to create marketable products and capture value rather than build public goods. Industrial R&D projects can be more patient and focused on fundamental research, but such projects are still ultimately pursued with the aim of furthering a company’s interests and are therefore not amenable to every important scientific project.

The original whitepaper in the Day One Project that proposed the idea of an FRO began to lay out some approximate comparisons, as well.

Even if your project is potentially a fit for the FRO model, if it can be done by another mechanism without severely curtailing or altering its mission, it likely should be. FROs take a lot of work to fundraise for, launch, and run compared to doing a project in an existing institution. And they are a relatively new model compared to the mature VC ecosystem, which has more opportunity for funding and support.

You don’t! Convergent Research doesn’t own the idea of FROs. We are actively encouraging others to pursue different versions of the model. However, Convergent Research offers a lot of support for FROs.

We expect people who work at FROs to have many opportunities in industry and academia after the FRO. Indeed, if the FRO goes well, FRO founders and employees will likely be the world’s experts in the new industry or research field spawned by their efforts at the FRO.

Gifts to Convergent Research can support FROs at three levels:

At the $10M+ level, you can potentially anchor a new FRO. This could be an FRO we’ve identified and pre-reviewed (we are happy to share a catalog of ideas), or it could be a pre-commitment that you’d be willing to fund an FRO in an area of your interest if and when we incubate one.

At the $1M+ level, you can join in funding an FRO that already has an anchor donor. Such contributions can often be de-risked by making such contributions contingent on adequate progress of the FRO. Or you can support a team of potential FRO founders to do full-time de-risking research as they develop a full FRO proposal.

At the $10k+ level, you can support our scientific roadmapping and FRO sourcing programs. For example, ~$60k is enough to support a workshop and whitepaper to develop ideas for FROs in an area of your interest.

You can sign up for email updates through this form.

FROs are finite-duration projects. During their later years they work to actively disseminate and deploy the public goods they create into the real world.

In some cases, public benefit will best be served by licensing technologies developed by the FRO to companies or by spinning off startups.

Free use of FRO IP for research purposes by academics and non-profits will be preserved regardless of the commercialization plan.

A top priority for FROs is ensuring the results of their work are disseminated and used broadly across the scientific field of which they are a part. This work starts before the FRO even launches: much of the FRO proposal review process is spent thoroughly vetting how specifically researchers would use the FRO’s proposed outputs to transform their work.

More concretely, here’s a non-exhaustive list of things FROs might do:

Convergent Research and FROs are part of a larger movement to explore new mechanisms for funding, organizing, and incentivizing scientific research. Good resources for learning more about this include A Vision of Metascience by Michael Nielsen and Kanjun Qiu, The Overedge Catalog by Samuel Arbesman, and Understanding science funding in tech, 2011-2021 by Nadia Asparouhova.