Merge Grants Q2 2025
Updates from Merge Grantees and Program Trends & Statistics
Merge Grants logged a 114% uptick in applications this past quarter compared with Q1 2025. As we grow, we remain steadfast in supporting the most ambitious technical builders. Acceptance now sits at just 3.37% — tighter than Harvard’s. Projects funded this quarter range from novel stem-cell engineering in Boston to retina-scanning for early Diabetic Retinopathy diagnosis in Bangladesh.
I’m excited to share updates from our latest grantees, as well as some program stats and trends we’ve been picking up on from the past 3 months.
Today we’re excited to highlight those who’ve received a grant in Q2:
Sean, engineering stem cells pre-transplant to optimize for specific disease treatment
Chloe, building an omni-directional VR treadmill
Abrar, retina-scanning hundreds of thousands of refugees with diabetes to enable early diagnosis of Diabetic Retinopathy
Rishi, making every crop on earth machine-readable
Andrew, creating a new generative music instrument with code
And nine exciting updates from grantees:
Chloe received follow-on funding from 1517 Fund and Bagel Fund and finished prototype 2 of a singular tile, which is now ready to be scaled to a segment (~20 tiles).
In addition to the epic work Santiago has been doing pushing forward with his Exo-ranger project, he and Merge teamed up to give $1k in Merge Grants to others working on exciting hardware/robotics projects. We look forward to sharing the winner(s) next quarter!
Andrew gave a talk on his project, Synchrotron, at PyCon Italia! Video below is time-stamped for the beginning of his presentation.
Tambe (Q1, 2025) who’s developing a novel phage-based antibacterial to fight typhoid and drug-resistant infections demonstrated that pairing holin with endolysin completely wipes out Salmonella Typhi in culture — clear proof that his engineered phage proteins can beat antibiotic-resistant strains! This is a big win.
Yoyo (Q1, 2025) who’s growing neurons for neuron-based computing, fabricated graphene-coated MEA plates in 5.5 min for < $1 each (commercial price ≈ $300). She and her team are assembling a full neuron-recording rig for about $3.3 k—one-third the usual cost — with zebrafish and C. elegans tests next.
Jackson (Q4, 2024) who’s been building low-cost micro weather stations for improved wildfire weather prediction has been making excellent progress. He’s now piloting his high-resolution, ML-based fire-behavior prediction system with three fire departments across California and Texas and expects first live deployments on real wildfires this summer. Merge’s grant allowed him to start mounting weather-sensor stations on fire trucks for better data and the team has since expanded with new ML and geospatial talent.
Brian (Q4, 2024), who’s upgrading Kenyan energy security with autonomous drone-based inspection of power line infrastructure, has begun his UAV flight tests and is developing his computer vision model now.
Aarav (Q4, 2024), developing brain-controlled prosthetics to help people regain mobility, recently succeeded in controlling the exoskeleton arm through EEG signals (effectively mind control). Watch his demo below:
Hector (Q3, 2024) just hit state-of-the-art with a lean 12 B-parameter model that rivals Gemini 2 Flash across the 30 most-spoken languages — and, when deployed on Etched’s Sohu hardware, it will run 10-20× faster than any competitor. You can view the announcement and benchmarks here. Below is a news clip of him speaking about his work.
Merge Grants in Stats
This quarter, we’ve gone deeper into the underlying verticals behind broader categories like AI/ML and hardware to make sure we’re getting to the real areas applicants are building in. MedTech and BioTech ranks #1 for Top Applicant Sectors in Q2, with the vast majority of them involving both hardware and AI/ML.
The headline takeaway here is that hardware’s 6-to-1 over-index shows how excited we are to be backing physical builds (UAVs, VR treadmills, oceanic research vessels, etc). Projects in software-based categories like DevTooling and EdTech generally don’t hit the ambition bar we’re hoping for, and despite accounting for nearly a quarter of all applications in Q2, no FinTech applications were funded by us.
You can see below how significant the falloff is from the general application pool to successfully granted sectors for EdTech, DevTooling and FinTech!
For those keeping tabs on emerging tech talent hubs, it’s no surprise that Waterloo and Toronto take up 2nd and 3rd place for top applicant locations. Similar to last quarter, you can see the strong delta between the most asked for item in budget requests compared to the most common item requested by people we end up funding successfully. PSA to anyone thinking of applying to build software: use freely available perks and credits to get you started like the ones found here!
We’ve put together a full report on the State of Microgrants with statistics from Merge Grants, Bagel Fund, OSV, EVM Capital and the Microgrant Guide. Make sure you’re subscribed so you see it next week!
We’re extremely excited to see where these talented builders’ projects will go and look forward to documenting their progress on Twitter.
We’re speaking with several prospective grantees this week — if you’d like to be next (or you know someone who would), learn more and apply for a Merge Grant here. To discover 30+ other microgrants and fellowships, check out the Microgrant Guide.
Until next time,
Ari, Julian, Kai and the Merge Club community