It was a busy month getting the final touches on academy, bringing on our TAs, hiring support team members, hiring a finance and business administrator, and completing all of our R&D Partnership contracts.
We ended up short on mentors for academy, forcing some students to merge mentor groups in several timezones, but overall the mentor procedure has been clearer for mentors this year than previous years (while still resulting in some lack of clarity for students).
In contrast to last month, we had several pieces of good news on grants and funding this month: our Simons grant has been selected for likely funding, our BRAIN Initiative Short Courses grant has been selected for likely funding, and we are in negotiations with Wellcome Trust for a large year long contract to support research cohorts in mental health and AI.
We lowered the length of impact scholars program, lowering our campaign to ~$200k, which feels more achievable in the short time we have to fundraise.
Working with Jitasa, we finalized our 2023 financials, wrote off ~$25k in past teaching assistant liabilities, and corrected our accounting procedures for reimbursable expenses through Rippling.
We are hosting a workshop for program officers on July 22nd in New York. The workshop title is “Supporting International Colloborative Neuroscience Projects”.
We have $638k in the bank, $143k in billable (money on grants or contracts we could bill for now), $18k we can bill next quarter, and an additional $1M in long term accounts receivable (money on grants or contracts for the future). We have $777k in submitted grants, $1.2M in submitted contract bids.
NeuroAI and Climate are on track to release on time and with ample attention to pre-pod feedback. Materials have been submitted on time and books are currently building.
Mentor recruitment did not go as well as previous years. It is unclear on why this is the case. It is likely due to the negative feedback from mentors we received in previous years that made them uncertain in engaging in the program again. We had to merge student mentor groups due to insufficient numbers of mentors.
Viviana is stewarding this program to ensure we keep it going for next year, helping to develop the launch plan and budget for it for Neuro, AI, and Climate.
The second half of our NASA award has us delivering the NASA open science 101 curriculum with our own adaptations to our own followers. Leanna Kalinowski is taking lead on this program and will help bring the team together to deliver a course in September 2024 and then repeatedly (quarterly) thereafter.
We secured a new contract this month to do matching for Wellcome trust. While small, these contracts have paved the way for a larger contract with Wellcome that is discussed in fundraising below. Matching services continue to be a point of awkwardness; not quite hitting sales or operational marks, but generally operating profitably.
We finished our last remaining R&D partnership contract. Overall the client was very happy with the results and we delivered under budget (though behind schedule). It was hard to prioritize Konstantine’s time correctly, and our attempt to hire from our network of volunteers did not work well, resulting in multiple bad starts where the person did not actually have the requisite skills to operate independently on the contract.
While we have plans to put together an affiliation program, but these won’t be refined until Q3 or Q4 2024. The plans to take in other Ronin scholars past Ben are not going to go forward as Ronin has comingled those funds and they are unavailable.
Bank of America Account: $263,601 USD
Lending Club Account: $286,397 USD
Mercury Account: $88,720 USD
Stripe: $0 USD
Note: I show Mercury account here for a financial picture overview, but it is not considered in our runway and budget calculations. It is budgeted and managed separately.
No new funds received in June besides cashing the ARNI check. That said, we did complete several contracts (~$18k) that we will invoice for in July and we received a new contract for $6,400 from Wellcome.
We are cowriting a contract with Wellcome Trust to provide cohort support and community facilitation for a new group in Mental Health and Generative AI. Ultimately, the program operates highly similarly to impact scholars, but over the course of a year. In general, our tasks will be to create a community website, build matchmaking into it, run professional development, educational, and hackathon/collaboration events, all leading up to an application process in February 2025 for an accelerator program we will facilitate. During the accelerator, research teams will receive direct support in the form of professional development, compute resources, training, and other services (such as grantwriting advice, etc), culminating in a submission to Wellcome’s major funding call in July 2025. This contract will be for $0.7 - 1.5 M USD and will support development of our matchmaking API, website integration, and fund R&D activities and research team support.
We moved to the next phase of the Simons grant for $150k, making it almost guaranteed. Similarly, our short course received a score of 24 from NIH, marking as ‘highly likely to be funded’. We are completing a Just in time information request by July 10th.
Our Amazon grant (Go Further, Faster) is still pending decisions.
We have many other grant submissions pending:
Government Grants
NSF CREST Supplement - $27,000 - Pending
NIH - BRAIN Initiative Short Courses - $200,000 - Pending (Score of 24 - highly likely)
Foundation Grants
Einstein Foundation - $200,000 - Pending (November)
Simons - $150,000 - Pending (September - Highly likely)
Amazon - $200,000 - Pending (July)
We will continue to pursue foundational funding and evaluate opportunities in government funding. Specifically, we are now raising on the back of the Impact Scholars Program (which is a longer term part time research fellowship at Neuromatch)
There are limitless government grants to pursue at varying levels of ideal fit. We are going to pursue these over the next 6 months (Though we will likely drop some):
NSF - Accelnets - Building a network of networks for international collaboration in science
NSF - ExLENT - Experiential learning in emerging and novel technologies
NSF - Advancing the AI Workforce
NIH - 2024 - Education Activities for Responsible Analyses of Complex, Large-Scale Data
All grants and opportunities we are pursuing are in the grant-tracker .
Mentioned above in contracts.
Our main sources of funding for this year will likely be government grants and earned income through R&D partnerships.
Upcoming $18k in invoices from 2i2c, TA payments, support team payments, and hiring a marketing person.
Our new payment model for academy has worked out well. With our projected hires and assuming Academy runs similarly to next year, our out of cash date is . This is the longest runway we have ever had and is mostly guaranteed, though highly dependent on our few active grants and subcontracts to not change.
We will be hiring a marketing specialist or marketing manager in the next month.
Nothing.