Funding & Grants

Funding organizations and funding opportunities for cellular-agriculture research — the organizations that fund the field, and the grant programs and research-portfolio mechanisms researchers can apply to or follow. CAAIL itself catalogues outputs (papers, software, datasets); the programs below produce primary outputs that become cataloguable in CAAIL’s core files as they are published. Research centers and consortia (which conduct rather than fund research) live in Other Resources / Cell-Ag Ecosystem Initiatives; the directories and databases these organizations maintain live in Databases.md.

Funding Organizations

Organizations that fund cellular-agriculture and alternative-protein research.

• New Harvest — a nonprofit research institute funding open, public cellular-agriculture science; the source organization behind the AICAI, Cellular Agriculture Science Engine, and CAPE programs below (and the Cultured Meat Safety Initiative catalogued in Other Resources).
• Good Food Institute (GFI) — a nonprofit think tank advancing alternative proteins, which runs a competitive open-access research-grant program (below) across plant-based, fermentation-derived, and cultivated-meat science.
• Bezos Earth Fund — a philanthropic fund whose sustainable-protein grantmaking backs research hubs including the Bezos Centre for Sustainable Protein at Imperial College London.
• Novo Nordisk Foundation — a Danish philanthropic foundation and one of the world’s largest, funding biomedical, biotechnology, and sustainability research; its planetary-health and sustainable-food grantmaking supports biosolutions, precision-fermentation, and cellular-agriculture-relevant science.

Funding Opportunities & Programs

Grant programs and research-portfolio mechanisms — sources of future cataloguable cell-ag research outputs.

• AI in Cellular Agriculture Initiative (AICAI) — New Harvest’s programmatic effort connecting AI / ML researchers with cellular agriculture: funding research (including an ML-for-media-optimization residency) and building open datasets. The closest mission-level analogue to CAAIL, though a research program rather than a catalogue.
• Cellular Agriculture Science Engine — A crowdfunded research-portfolio mechanism (New Harvest with FootPrint Coalition and Experiment.com) that funds cell-ag projects; a source of future cataloguable research outputs.
• Cellular Agriculture Prairies Ecosystem (CAPE) — A New Harvest–led, multi-partner initiative (funded by PrairiesCan, Alberta Innovates, Mitacs, and philanthropic donors) building cellular-agriculture research and biomanufacturing capacity on the Canadian Prairies.
• GFI Research Grant Program — the Good Food Institute’s competitive open-access research-funding program across plant-based, fermentation-derived, and cultivated-meat science — a source of future cataloguable research outputs.
• Bezos Earth Fund AI for Climate and Nature Grand Challenge — a multi-year, $100 million grand challenge from the Bezos Earth Fund funding AI-driven climate and nature solutions; its sustainable-proteins focus area backs AI and ML applied to alternative-protein and cellular-agriculture problems, awarding Phase I seed grants followed by larger Phase II implementation grants.