Funding the work everyone builds on.

TCA’s grants back early research and field-building that make open-source models more reliable, more trustworthy, and more widely adoptable. This is foundational work with long horizons, and its benefits accrue to everyone building in the open.

What we fund

• Academic and independent research on the reliability, evaluation, and safe deployment of open models
• Open evaluation projects and benchmarks that anyone can inspect, reproduce, and contest
• Data commons: openly governed datasets with documented provenance
• Safety and governance tooling for open systems
• The open-source maintenance work that quietly holds the ecosystem together

What we look for

Full criteria will be published when the program opens. The questions we expect to ask of every proposal:

• Openness: does the work advance widespread use of open models, and do its outputs stay in the commons?
• Additionality: would this happen without TCA? We fund what falls between venture capital and traditional grant programs.
• Ecosystem leverage: does it create durable infrastructure, persistent standards, or capability that outlasts the grant?
• Technical credibility: is the approach feasible, the team capable, the adoption path realistic?
• Global participation: does it expand access beyond historically concentrated geographies and institutions?