Trelis AI Grants

Overview

Trelis Research runs a quarterly grant program for individuals working on open AI models. Each quarter it awards $500 grants to selected applicants, with a parallel $10,000 SAFE investment track for projects that incorporate (Delaware C Corp preferred).

What You Get

• $500 grant per quarter, paid to an individual.
• Equity-free - Trelis states it does not claim any rights to the grantee's work.
• Optional $10,000 investment (SAFE) track for incorporated projects.
• Payout by bank transfer to supported countries, PayPal or Stripe invoice, or RunPod GPU credits as a last resort.

Eligibility

• Applicants must be individuals of any age and location with an active GitHub or GitLab account.
• Eligible work spans training, fine-tuning, inference, and deployment tooling that progresses open AI models - for example LoRA/QLoRA fine-tunes, quantization and serving frameworks, evaluation harnesses, or agent frameworks built on open models.
• Applications are rolling, and Trelis says to expect a response within 30 days of applying; shortlisted candidates are invited to a 15-minute interview during the quarter.
• Grant recipients submit a headline, a 280-character tweet-style summary, and a 500-word project summary; Trelis may publicise the recipient and project with permission.

How to Get Started

Apply through the form linked from the Trelis AI Grants page. Decisions and offers are made on a rolling basis throughout the quarter, and completed cohorts are published on the page (the most recent listed are 1Q2026 and 2Q2026).