Deadline: June 15, 2026
Applications are open for the Biswas Family Foundation Fast Grants Program 2026. Fast Grants are lightweight, fast-turnaround gifts for researchers who want to explore an idea at the intersection of AI and health — but lack the seed capital to try. The Foundation has heard that scientists cannot easily buy compute, model-training credits, dataset access, or coding-agent tokens through traditional grants. Fast Grants from the Biswas Family Foundation close that gap.
Fast Grants fund curiosity-driven projects connected to any of these themes:
- Training, fine-tuning, or evaluating models on biomedical data
- Exploring or assembling datasets that could unlock new clinical or biological insight
- Building AI tools or agents that scale a scientist’s leverage
- Pilot experiments that de-risk a bigger funding ask
- Anything else where modest, fast capital meaningfully accelerates an AI or data-driven path to a health breakthrough
Grant
The Biswas Family Foundation will sponsor two funding cycles per year, with up to $3M deployed annually in total gifts. Each cycle is intended to support:
- 20 projects with $25K (Small curiosity sprints (only tier open to undergraduates)
- 10 projects with $50K (Pilot experiments)
- 5 projects with $100K (More ambitious projects)
Eligibility
Researchers at any career stage across academic institutions worldwide are eligible. They particularly welcome:
- Early-career faculty
- Postdoctoral scholars
- Graduate students
- Undergraduates (with faculty sponsorship; $25K tier only)
Applicants must be affiliated with an institution eligible to receive a charitable gift from a US private foundation:
- US institutions: any 501(c)(3) public charity in good standing — universities, non-profit research institutes, academic medical centers, qualifying hospitals; state or federal government instrumentalities (e.g., state university research foundations) are eligible.
- Non-US institutions: must be a foreign equivalent — confirmed via active equivalency determination (NGOsource, etc.) or received via a US-based fiscal sponsor that is itself a 501(c)(3). If you’re unsure, indicate this on your application — your sponsored programs office can usually answer in a single email.
- For-profit companies, individual researchers receiving funds personally, and OFAC-sanctioned institutions are not eligible.
Application
The application is designed to be low-friction and concise. Each section must be formatted in bullet points according to the following requirements:
- Project Title
- One-sentence summary: A plain-language description of your project that we can publish on the BFF website if funded (≤200 characters)
- The question / idea: What you want to explore and why it matters (3–5 bullets, ~50 words, 275 characters)
- What you’ll do: The experiment/approach (3–5 bullets, ~50 words, 275 characters)
- Why now / why this team: Relevant background (2–3 bullets, ~30 words, 200 characters)
- Budget: Line items totaling $25k, $50k, or $100k; single payment; 12-month project period; indirect costs ≤ 15%. (~50 words, 275 characters)
- Outputs: What you intend to release publicly; sharing back is strongly preferred but not strictly required (1–2 bullets, ~20 words, 125 characters)
- Brief bio: Your role and institution, plus 2–3 representative pieces of work (3–4 bullets, ~80 words, 400 characters)
For more information, visit Biswas Family Foundation Fast Grants Program.
