Merge Grants Q3 2024

Merge is a club for microgrant recipients working on big ideas.

Hey everyone,

Julian here sharing a quick update on Merge Club and our newest experiment: Merge Grants.

We started Merge with the goal of bringing together young grant recipients — many who are geographically constrained by wherever their families live — so they could build an epic peer group and make progress on their ambitious projects.

This quarter we also tried out giving grants of our own. Later in this post Ari will share the incredible people we’ve backed and more about what they’re working on.

When we transitioned from helping existing grant recipients to giving our own grants, it became clear that a significant amount of progress can be made with a small amount of funding and a vote of confidence.

We’re cooking up a lot of stuff right now to make sure that no young builder ever has to kill a good idea because they don’t have $1000.

More soon.

Take it away, Ari!

---

Hey!  

As Julian mentioned, we’ve been working to make it a lot easier for builders to discover and receive non-dilutive funding.

• Grant Guide

• Podcast episodes with grant recipients

• Our own microgrant whose recipients are chosen by the Merge community, called the Merge Grant

Here are the grantees from our first batch:

• Arthur, developing an affordable EEG system

  

  

  check out this awesome 13yo’s github contribution chart

• Kenneth, working on a headband device to monitor the glymphatic system (which can pick up early markers of neurological diseases like alzheimer’s, parkinson’s, etc.)

• Rashi, building an open-air natural mosquito repellant using algae

  

  sleek design as well 👀

• Hector, creating a no-code platform that allows Governments, Universities, and individuals to utilize LLMs for endangered language preservation

• Kevin, building the world’s first setter robot that delivers volleyballs perfectly every time

• Richa, creating an open-source wearable to help people with severe motor disorders (like ALS, cerebral palsy, locked-in syndrome) communicate using just their tongue movements

• Aaryan, who’s building the largest public database of phages

  (subscribe to our YouTube to be notified once our full podcast with him drops)

• Jayant, who’s solving stuttering with AI speech therapy

We’re extremely excited to see where projects will go and look forward to documenting their progress via the podcast on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube. In the meantime, if you or someone you know is working on an ambitious project and $50-$1,000 would make a meaningful difference, apply for a Merge Grant here.

Until next time,

Ari, Julian, Kai and the Merge Club community