Fast Grants

Fast Grants is an American charity that provides funding for scientific research. The project was created in response to the COVID-19 pandemic to provide quick funding to scientists working on research projects that could help with the pandemic.

History
The project was launched in April 2020 by Tyler Cowen, an economics professor at George Mason University; Patrick Collison, co-founder of online payment processing platform Stripe; and Patrick Hsu, a bioengineer at the University of California.

Support
The project is supported by donations from Arnold Ventures, The Audacious Project, The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, John Collison, Patrick Collison, Crankstart, Jack Dorsey, Kim and Scott Farquhar, Paul Graham, Reid Hoffman, Fiona McKean and Tobias Lütke, Yuri and Julia Milner, Elon Musk, Chris and Crystal Sacca, Schmidt Futures, and others.

Grants
Fast Grants provides funding between $10,000 and $500,000. The charity says they respond to applications within two days, and will also fund researchers outside the United States.

As of April 2021, Fast Grants has awarded 250 grants totaling more than $50 million to researchers working on COVID-19 related projects, including testing, clinical work, surveillance, virology, drug development and trials, and PPE. Fast Grants provided initial funding for SalivaDirect, the saliva test used in the NBA “bubble” in Orlando during the 2020 season. Other notable grant recipients include Addgene, the Center for Open Science, Susan Athey, Carolyn Bertozzi, Catherine Blish, Pamela Bjorkman, Susan Daniel, Barbara Engelhardt, Laura Esserman, Judith Frydman, Amy Gladfelter, Eva Harris, Akiko Iwasaki, Kevin Kain, Yoshihiro Kawaoka, Nevan Krogan, Ronald Levy, Allison McGeer, Miriam Merad, Keith Mostov, Mihai Netea, Daniel Nomura, Melanie Ott, Bradley Pentelute, Rosalind Picard, Hidde Ploegh, Angela Rasmussen, Erica Ollmann Saphire, Katherine Seley-Radtke, Erec Stebbins, Alice Ting, Alain Townsend, David Veesler, Bert Vogelstein, Tania Watts, and Qian Zhang.

As of January 2022, new Fast Grants applications have been paused due to lack of additional funding.

Impact
The pioneering Fast Grants program has inspired multiple other well-funded efforts that replicate its low overhead, high impact funding model. Some examples include Impetus Grants for longevity research (>$30M of funding), Robert Downey Jr.'s Footprint Coalition for climate change, and Superalignment Fast Grants from OpenAI for safe AI development ($10M of funding).