Hello everyone,
Hello, and welcome to the mid-August update. 55 new calls have opened since the August roundup, and three patterns we have been tracking all year moved again this cycle.
Women-led stopped being the theme and became the eligibility. A cohort of funders this cycle does not ask whether your work helps women; it asks whether you are a women-led organization, and gates the money accordingly. COSPE’s Inclusive Nissa grant is written for women’s financial inclusion in Egypt; the Numun Fund resources feminist and women-led tech; C3’s EmpowerHer takes only women-founded climate startups across MENA; Reliance Foundation’s SheConnects funds women-focused digital work in India; Enthuse and Tara back women-founded ventures outright. That is five or more funders in one batch using the same structural filter. We have tracked women in tech and science as a capital corridor since May and as a pipeline through July; this cycle the corridor widens past tech into climate and financial inclusion, and the eligibility gate hardens as gender programming keeps drawing political fire.
The corporate accelerator is now competing on not taking your equity. In June we flagged equity creeping into corporate-adjacent accelerators. This cycle the counter-move is loud: the company-backed programs drawing the most founders are the ones advertising that they take none of it. Google for Startups is putting up to ZAR R1M of non-dilutive funding into a South African cohort; C3’s EmpowerHer is explicitly equity-free; Villgro Africa and Social Alpha run catalytic, stage-based support rather than buying in; Reckitt’s Catalyst offers flexible financing to social entrepreneurs. Four to five corporate and corporate-adjacent funders, same instrument shift, in one batch. The venture-style capital we have watched become the default shape since May is now differentiating on terms, and equity-free is the pitch.
The money for the machinery of research keeps flowing, and a national council just anchored it. A recurring thread since March is funders paying for the research apparatus itself, methods, measurement, and institutions, rather than service delivery. It holds this cycle and gains an anchor: Merck KGaA’s open research grants, the Pfizer-Astellas medical-education call, TRAILS4SOIL’s soil MRV procurement, and the Slovak-Israeli bilateral R&D program all fund the plumbing of knowledge, and South Africa’s Medical Research Council opens a national research-enterprise slate behind them. As bilateral aid recedes, national research councils and corporate foundations are quietly rebuilding the base layer of who gets to do the science.
Cross-Cutting / Intersectional Impact: 3 new!
Global Health & WASH: 12 new!
Gender Equality & Women’s Empowerment: 4 new!
Education, Human Rights & Inclusion: 13 new!
Agriculture, Climate, Environment, Energy & Food: 16 new!
Humanitarian Aid, Emergency Programming & DRR: 1 new!
Innovation, Research & Smart Cities: 6 new!
The funders on this page work across problem areas rather than inside one, backing proven institutions with unrestricted capital and open research grants instead of single-sector projects. The Earthshot Prize hands its winners unrestricted capital across five environmental domains, while Merck KGaA and the Novo Nordisk Foundation fund investigator-led research that deliberately straddles health, climate, and sustainability.
Merck KGaA 2026 Research Grants, Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany. *New!* *Closing soon!*
Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany opens its 2026 Research Grants, a collaborative program supporting scientists at any career stage working in biotechnology and pharmaceutical research. The company uses these grants to pull promising early science toward problems its own pipeline cares about, funding predictive in-vitro models for neuroinflammatory disease, artificial intelligence for cell culture and bioprocessing, cell-free screening assays for protein interactions, greener remediation of contaminated soil and water, and computer-aided molecule synthesis. What the program backs is not a finished result but a working collaboration, and the structure shows it: abstracts move to joint deep-dive workshops where applicants refine proposals alongside company scientists, signaling that Merck wants partners it can build with. The strongest fits are researchers ready to develop translatable science in genuine partnership with industry.
Geographies: Global.
Who can apply: Scientists at all career stages affiliated with any research-based institution, university, or company worldwide.
Funding amount: Up to EUR 250,000/year for up to 2 years (neuroinflammatory disease models); up to EUR 150,000/year (AI in cell culture; material remediation); up to EUR 100,000/year (cell-free screening assays).
Targeted Sectors / SDGs: Health; Innovation & Technology, Climate & Environment; SDGs 3, 6, 9. Focus: in-vitro disease models, ai bioprocessing, soil and water remediation.
Deadline: August 31, 2026.
The grant is a collaboration, not a check: abstracts move to joint workshops with Merck scientists. Propose science that genuinely benefits from an industry partner’s tools and problems, and be ready to co-develop, not just to receive.
The Earthshot Prize, The Earthshot Prize. *New!*
The Earthshot Prize recognizes and scales solutions to the planet’s most urgent environmental challenges, naming five winners each year across its goals of protecting nature, cleaning the air, reviving the oceans, building a waste free world, and fixing the climate. The prize backs proven, ready to grow answers over untested concepts, pairing each award with a year of tailored support, global visibility, and connections designed to move a solution from promise to widespread adoption. Winners and finalists join a fellowship built to accelerate their reach. By working through a network of official nominators rather than open submission, the prize signals that it wants credible innovations surfaced by trusted institutions. The strongest fits are established innovators with demonstrated environmental impact and a clear path to scale globally.
Geographies: Global.
Who can apply: Individuals, communities, businesses, nonprofits, and other organizations worldwide offering innovative, impactful, and scalable solutions to one of the five Earthshot goals.
Funding amount: £1 million (GBP 1,000,000) per winner; five winners each year.
Targeted Sectors / SDGs: Climate & Environment; Innovation & Technology; SDGs 11, 12, 13, 14, 15. Focus: protect and restore nature, clean our air, revive our oceans.
Deadline: September 9, 2026.
Earthshot rewards scalable solutions against five environmental goals, and nominations run wide, so the bar is evidence of scale, not novelty. Show traction and a path to millions of beneficiaries, and map cleanly to one goal, not several.
NNF-IAS Fellowships in Health and Sustainability (First Call: Inequity in Health), Novo Nordisk Foundation. *New!*
The Novo Nordisk Foundation, working through the eight Nordic Institutes for Advanced Studies, opens its first call for NNF-IAS Fellowships in Health and Sustainability, funding individual researchers to study inequity in health. The foundation is using salaried, multiyear fellowships to build lasting research capacity across the Nordic region rather than issuing one-off project grants. It wants to back curiosity-driven work on the social, structural, and environmental roots of health disparities, and it groups fellows into a shared trans-Nordic theme so findings compound across disciplines. Opening the call to any nationality and any field, and requiring genuine mobility, signals that the foundation prizes fresh perspectives and real relocation. The strongest fits are post-PhD researchers ready to reframe health inequity through interdisciplinary, collaborative science.
Geographies: Europe.
Who can apply: Individual researchers of any nationality and from any academic discipline who hold a PhD and have 2 to 10 years of post-PhD career experience (the PhD training period is excluded from the calculation).
Funding amount: Full-time salary based on seniority (regulated by host-country collective union agreements; not quantified on source) plus a research-cost budget of up to EUR 20,000, relocation travel expenses (subject to prior approval) and relocation assistance..
Targeted Sectors / SDGs: Health; Climate & Environment; SDGs 3, 10, 13. Focus: health disparities, structural determinants of health, health innovation and technologies.
Deadline: October 1, 2026.
This individual fellowship funds researchers, not institutions, and centers the structural determinants of health. Frame your work at the health-environment intersection, and apply as a person with a 2 to 10 year post-PhD track.
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