Earlier than co-founding A.I. corporations like Perplexity AI, Andy Konwinski was a Ph.D. scholar in laptop science on the College of California, Berkeley. It was there that he helped develop Apache Spark, an open-source information processing engine that laid the groundwork for Databricks, now one among Silicon Valley’s prime A.I. corporations.
Berkeley was additionally the birthplace of his newest and most private challenge: the Laude Institute, a brand new analysis group constructed by and for laptop scientists. Backed by $100 million of Konwinski’s personal funding, the institute goals to help analysis with the potential for broad, optimistic affect. “That is essentially the most private challenge of my life, and it’s been a very long time coming,” Konwinski wrote in a weblog publish saying the launch on June 23.
The founding workforce consists of researchers Chris Rytting, Ok. Tighe, Justin Fiedler and Lindsey Gregory. The institute’s board options distinguished figures in tech, together with Turing Award winner David Patterson; Jeff Dean, chief scientist at Google DeepMind; and Joelle Pineau, former head of A.I. analysis at Meta. Whereas Konwinski is the first funder, further help from different technologists is predicted.
What’s going to the Laude Institute fund? Slingshots, Moonshots
The Laude Institute is launching with two flagship initiatives geared toward accelerating impactful A.I. analysis. The primary, referred to as Slingshots, provides fast-track grants to help early-stage initiatives. In partnership with researchers at Stanford College, Slingshots has already backed an A.I. agent benchmark that was later cited by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei following the discharge of the Claude 4 mannequin in Could.
The second initiative, Moonshots, will present larger-scale funding for labs tackling a few of the subject’s most formidable challenges. Focus areas embrace scientific discovery, civic discourse, healthcare and workforce re-skilling. The institute plans to award two $250,000 seed grants in every class and scale up promising efforts into multi-year, multimillion-dollar labs.
Past utilized A.I., Konwinski’s institute can even put money into what he calls “foundational work that advances computing itself.” Its first main grant on this space will present $3 million yearly over 5 years to ascertain a brand new A.I. lab on the College of California, Berkeley. The AI Methods Lab, anticipated to open by 2027, will likely be led by a workforce of distinguished researchers together with Ion Stoica, Matei Zaharia, Joey Gonzalez and Raluca-Ada Popa.
Konwinski’s previous ventures in A.I. have been extremely profitable. In 2022, he co-founded Perplexity AI, the A.I.-powered search engine now valued at $14 billion. Greater than a decade earlier, he helped launch Databricks, which reached a $62 billion valuation earlier this yr. In 2024, he additionally based Laude Ventures, a enterprise capital agency targeted on early-stage tech startups, and launched a $1 million prize to encourage innovation round an A.I. coding benchmark.
With the Laude Institute, Konwinski goals to create a platform that funds, convenes and elevates the work of laptop scientists. “For years, I’ve wished to construct one thing that will assist extra researchers take that journey from concept to affect,” he mentioned. “Our objective is easy: get extra world-changing analysis into folks’s palms.”
