Funding with no company needed
A checked list of funding you can take as an individual for AI and tech builders, with the eligibility gates spelled out: what it costs you, who can apply, and from where.
72 programmes
Sector-agnostic pre-seed cohort of two to three founders building breakthrough technology, investing up to $1M as equity or a convertible note over three months.
Three-month in-person batch in San Francisco; YC invests $500,000 in two safes, $125,000 of it for a fixed 7%.
$250,000 on a no-cap no-discount MFN SAFE for AI-native product startups, plus $600,000 in Azure and partner credits.
INR 360,000 Talent Investment stipend during team formation, then $125,000 on a post-money SAFE for 8%; 24 weeks split between Bangalore and San Francisco.
£6,000 Talent Investment stipend during team formation, then $125,000 on a post-money SAFE for 8%; 24 weeks split between London and San Francisco.
Three-month online programme to find a co-founder and build an MVP, paid for by the participant (EUR 1,000+VAT); top teams can pitch for a convertible investment up to EUR 100,000.
Up to $5,000 in Lambda cloud credits for qualifying AI researchers to run work on Lambda Instances, with select research featured on Lambda's site.
$1,000 a month per chapter, no strings attached and no ownership claimed, open to individuals, groups and organizations through a single shared application form.
$100 to $1,000 for a solo builder's bill of materials, open to anyone of any age anywhere in the world, roughly ten days from application to funded.
Fast retroactive grants of 1-5 ETH for projects already live on Base; the Base team finds recipients through its own discovery process and community nominations rather than an application form.
A weekly 2 ETH pool distributed to active Base builders based on what they actually shipped that week, with no proposal and no minimum project size.
Rolling milestone-based grants for public goods on Solana; no grant size is published, and applications are reviewed continuously.
Three-month hybrid pre-seed programme for Indian and Indian-origin AI founders, investing up to $1M-$2M as equity or a convertible note alongside Google's AI Futures Fund, plus up to $350,000 in Google compute credits.
Twelve weeks in person in San Francisco; $500K for 10% upfront on a SAFE plus a further $500K committed to the next round within 18 months.
$400K upfront for 7% on a standard SAFE plus $600K guaranteed in the next external round; eight-week in-person bootcamp then open-ended residency.
$250K on an uncapped, no-discount MFN SAFE plus a large compute credits package; Conviction publishes no equity percentage, so the stake is unknown.
Rolling milestone-based convertible grants for public goods that have a commercial component; no amount or conversion terms are published.
Pays open source maintainers, community managers and technical writers directly as freelance contractors for 3 to 12 months at 6 to 32 hours a week; hourly rate negotiated, not published.
Six months inside the SPC community to ideate and validate, with no cost and no equity taken; rolling admission.
Seed equity investment of $500K to $5M per company, with an eight-week immersion once a year and open-ended platform support; no equity percentage published.
First cheque of $350K to $1.25M at pre-seed on Seedsummit standard terms; Seedcamp publishes no fixed equity percentage.
Grants of $5,000 to $500,000 for games, media, enterprise, education and open source tooling work using Unreal Engine, awarded in two dated submission cycles a year.
Twelve weeks in person in NYC; up to $500K guaranteed, of which Betaworks Ventures invests up to $250K on an uncapped SAFE at a 25% discount and takes a 5% common stock stake.
Six-month cohort taking roughly 20 startups every six months; the SkyDeck Fund invests $210,000 for 7.5%, against a $7.5K programme fee.
Four-month in-person programme in Palo Alto; $150,000 investment for a 6% stake, subject to terms and diligence.
Fourteen-week programme investing a fixed $125K for 7% equity, taking only seven companies per cohort.
$120,000 invested per company over a twelve-week programme in San Francisco or New York; AngelPad does not publish the equity percentage it takes.
$100k for 7.5% on a standard post-money SAFE, for pre-seed B2B software companies that have raised under $500k and have an MVP in market.
NLnet's general-purpose open internet fund, EUR 5,000 to 50,000 per project; its thirteenth and final call closed June 1st 2026 and the successor open call is stated to reopen after the summer.
EUR 5,000 to 50,000 from a EUR 450,000 call for work on a self-hostable federated hosting stack, running to November 2027.
EUR 5,000 to 50,000 for work on privacy-preserving digital payment technology in and around GNU Taler, on recurring calls running through August 2027.
A one-year $24,000 stipend supplement for enrolled PhD students doing open-access academic research on designated Ethereum-relevant topics.
An eight-week virtual founder programme for pre-seed teams building on Base, with a $10k grant on admission and a $50k investment for a minimum of three teams.
Self-serve AWS credit tier for bootstrapped founders with no investor or accelerator affiliation.
The pre-funded tier: $2,000 in Google Cloud credits valid for 12 months, for startups with an MVP that have not raised institutional funding yet.
Three-month fintech accelerator in San Francisco investing $500,000 for 10% equity; note that themint.vc did not respond when checked, so no current cohort dates could be confirmed.
Six-month AI accelerator investing $125K for 7% equity, with a $25,000 participation fee that is deductible from the investment.
Themed open calls awarding up to $50,000 plus a year of mentorship to open source projects; no call was open at the time of this fetch, the most recent published round being the AI and Environmental Justice Awards.
$5,000 to $50,000 for open source AI projects, paid as cash or as compute, with no stated deadline.
Retroactively rewards onchain applications that have already seen significant adoption on supported OP Chains, scored on Superchain growth, onchain value and interop adoption.
Retroactively rewards already-launched toolchain software (compilers, libraries, debuggers) used by Superchain builders, measured by an algorithm rather than by proposal.
Grants awarded against ESP Wishlist items, which define high-level goals and stay open rather than running to a deadline. No Wishlist items were live at the time of capture.
Funds development and maintenance of foundational open source infrastructure where the described work costs more than EUR 50,000, applied for continuously via an application platform.
Grants and fellowships for zero-to-one ideas, open worldwide to anyone 13 or older, with no grant size published on the program page.
Bi-annual open call for pre-seed and seed founders, built around a four-day Arc Intensive; Sequoia publishes no standard cheque size or equity percentage.
Up to $15,000 in Together AI platform credits plus 3 hours of forward-deployed engineering for startups that have raised up to $5M.
Forward-looking grants for already-launched Superchain apps: you submit a growth plan with KPIs and a requested allocation, reviewed by the Grants Council in a dated season window.
Numbered, dated grant rounds you apply into; matching funds are pooled from partners and allocated per-domain by mechanisms chosen by that domain's allocator.
Virtual incubation for AI and ML startups at T-Hub's MATH centre of excellence, offering compute, tooling and mentorship; no investment amount, equity or fee is published.
A residency for repeat founders taking ten teams per batch; HF0 publishes no investment amount or equity percentage on its own site, so both are left unknown.