It was interesting comparing this update to the same month two years ago (which was the first of these monthly updates). Two years ago the update was ‘yay, we have our first HR system and a budget document’.
There are fewer updates this month than usual as people are head’s down focusing on academy. Content creation is going smoothly for Academy, and operations are moving along well.
We are missing many mentors for academy and need more signups at this link .
We signed on Benjamin Redelings as our first paid researcher/PI. Ben comes to us from the Ronin Institute, which closed this month. We will probably see several more scholars join Neuromatch from the institute and serve as PIs on US grants.
We had a small string of bad news on funding this month: The Amaranth Foundation deal has fallen through. Waiting on additional info from Blake and Patrick before continuing. We were not selected as winners in the Tools Competition. We did not get the IUSE grant.
With a proposal and budget in hand for expanding the impact scholars program into our other domains, we are beginning a fundraising campaign for $400k to try to launch impact scholars this year.
We have $491k in the bank, $147k in billable (money on grants or contracts we could bill for now), $116k we can bill next quarter, and an additional $900k in long term accounts receivable (money on grants or contracts for the future). We have $1.4M in submitted grants, $0k in submitted contract bids.
These programs are on track and material is coming along well!
Our new reworked mentoring program is promising, but requires more mentors than before. We are having difficulty getting mentors in some timezones due to the large population of students we have in those timezones compared to the relatively lower population of established researchers.
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.
We leveraged our matching tools this month in new ways for the American Society of Cell Biology (ASCB) who has been a long term partner in our matching. We used our matching tools to construct their conference tracks by “anti-matching” talks to create separate/distinct talk tracks. We are doing a similar thing by grouping posters into more useful groupings.
No significant updates here. We continue to make progress on our existing R&D partnerships, and have involved Viviana as an additional staff member contributing to these projects.
After the Ronin Institute announced its closure (thank you to Joseph Gum for notifying us), we reached out to the scholars there to see if anybody needed a home for their independent scholarship. Several people did. After interviewing them and considering the range of subjects Ronin supported, we worked with a few scholars in the computational sciences (computational biology, big-data-oriented cognitive science etc) to offer them spots at Neuromatch. One of them has already transitioned their grant funding to us. Ben Redelings is building open source software for biology on an NSF grant currently. This represents $12k in indirect funding for Neuromatch and bulks up our revenue, helping us to qualify for more and larger funding in the future.
Bank of America Account: $138,440 USD
Lending Club Account: $48,465 USD
Mercury Account: $88,720 USD
Stripe: $305,065 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.
We finally got our $7000 from Deepmind. It only required the coordination of three board members, multiple external contacts, and two different banks over the course of 6 months. Big congratulations to the team on this collaborative effort, haha.
We also received $50,000 from Gatsby and $97,000 from Columbia/ARNI.
We did not win the Tools Competition. Ultimately, the concern/reason was that it was not clear our tool would work in other classroom environments besides our own. Additionally, it did not seem uniquely differentiated or more powerful than supporting collaborative learning through other means.
The Amaranth deal fell through for unknown reasons. It is not our deal, but Blake and Patrick are looking to rescue it.
Connected Minds is suggesting it is unlikely they will be able to offer any funding but may offer mentors, instructors. They are considering a small amount of funding.
We have many other grant submissions pending:
Government Grants
NSF CREST Supplement - $27,000 - Pending (Info in July?)
NSF Cybertraining - $750,000 - Pending (Info in July?)
NIH - BRAIN Initiative Short Courses - $200,000 - Pending (Info in June) (very unlikely now due to BRAIN cuts)
Foundation Grants
Connected Minds - $150,000 - Pending (July)
Einstein Foundation - $200,000 - Pending (November)
Simons - $150,000 - Pending (July -> September)
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:
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 .
No additional earned income this month.
Our main sources of funding for this year will likely be government grants and earned income through R&D partnerships.
We have received $17k in invoices from 2i2c. Next up is video editing costs and then TA payments
The unknown of academy finances makes our runway very difficult to figure out. With our projected hires and assuming Academy runs similarly to next year, our out of cash date is somewhere between with a most likely scenario being .
Business Administrator (to help us with finances, taxes, and admin tasks) and Marketing Hire to help promote research partnerships and course.
Nothing.