Are you making progress on an impactful AI product or startup, but also worried about the cost it will take to launch and scale? We released a new searchable database of AI software and compute grants and credits so anyone can find the most relevant grant or credit program with $50M+ in active programs that fund AI development.
We're in the AI Boom. Does that favor the incumbent or the newcomer? Optimistically, an open source model like DeepSeek can drop on a random Thursday and set new best in class benchmarks for anyone to use however they please. Realistically, the cost to train a foundational model and employ researchers who've proven to be able to make a foundational model, is entirely out of reach for startups, even the well funded ones (but maybe not the most well funded ones, i.e. the "startups" raising billions). And the moats that had already existed with traditional software companies like marginal costs of hosting infrastructure and network effects remain fully active and in effect, i.e. how could OpenAI's API pricing continue to drop? and after every OpenAI demo, how do we already know what follows will be a thousand tweets about the startups they supposedly killed?
So is it a bad time to build an AI startup? If in the future, AI were to say enslave all humans, yes you would probably have regrets to yourself in a hyper personalized human battery power pod. Business wise, of course there's money to be made right now in the AI industry. And not by running deepfake scams; but rather by building legitimate AI infused businesses. The thought in the back of your head, won't FAANG / FAAMG / GAFAM / MANGO / whatever-we-call-that-these-days just build that and kill my company, is evidence that demand is there.
Startup discount programs have long been apart of the marketing plan of tech giants. In fact, HackerNoon was in part made possible by software grants from companies like Google, Cloudflare and Algolia. These are tradeoffs that young companies face. As AI giants race to claim marketshare, they do giveaway AI software and GPU credits. The market's ripe with millions in active AI software and compute credit programs that you, your project or your startup may qualify for. Long term tradeoffs aside, do you want to pay for next X million AI tokens? Or do you want the AI company to?
Previously, it was difficult to find what AI credits and grants are actually available. I should know; I made the first version of this database with 'deep research' from all the foundational models, combined it, and guess what? 90%+ of the details were wrong. Amounts, links, dates - just all over the place, hallucinated, or not precise enough. We ended up reviewing, cutting, and redoing every entry by human hand - all the devs QA-ing your colleagues vibe coding projects know what I'm saying.
How The AI Software and Compute Grants and Credit Search Works
All program entries can be filtered by category. Our initial categories are: Academic Programs, AI/ML platforms, API, Cloud Infrastructure, Communications, Competitions, Database & Storage, Dev Tooling, Government Grants, Security & Identity.
You can also filter by amount like 0-$1k or $1k-$10k or $10k-$50k and so on. Or simply search the company name you are building with or the category you are building or thinking of building in.
All program cards and pages have a very important "Apply for Access" button. Microsoft Azure pictured below.
This is the not just AI hallucina-slapping a /startups onto the domain, calling it a job well done and rate limit exceeded; this is the HackerNoon team curating the most direct 3rd party link to apply for the credits that we could find and verify at the time of publication. We intend to update as we go. The secondary button of "Company Data & Blogs" links to more free HackerNoon resources about the company, their business data and blogs (ex NVIDIA, IBM, and so on).
Want to get your AI grant listed here? Fill out the form on the site:
Do you see anything that needs corrected in any listing? Contact us or comment below.