Before co-founding A.I. companies like Perplexity AI, Andy Konwinski was a Ph.D. student in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. It was there that he helped develop Apache Spark, an open-source data processing engine that laid the groundwork for Databricks, now one of Silicon Valley’s top A.I. companies.
Berkeley was also the birthplace of his latest and most personal project: the Laude Institute, a new research organization built by and for computer scientists. Backed by $100 million of Konwinski’s own funding, the institute aims to support research with the potential for broad, positive impact. “This is the most personal project of my life, and it’s been a long time coming,” Konwinski wrote in a blog post announcing the launch on June 23.
The founding team includes technologists Chris Rytting, K. Tighe, Justin Fiedler and Lindsey Gregory. The institute’s board also features prominent figures in tech, including Turing Award winner David Patterson; Jeff Dean, chief scientist at Google DeepMind; and Joelle Pineau, former head of A.I. research at Meta. While Konwinski is the primary funder, additional support from others is expected.
What will the Laude Institute fund? Slingshots, Moonshots
The Laude Institute is launching with two flagship initiatives aimed at accelerating impactful A.I. research. The first, called Slingshots, offers fast-track grants to support early-stage projects. In partnership with researchers at Stanford University, Slingshots has already backed an A.I. agent benchmark that was later cited by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei following the release of the Claude 4 model in May.
The second initiative, Moonshots, will provide larger-scale funding for labs tackling some of the field’s most ambitious challenges. Focus areas include scientific discovery, civic discourse, healthcare and workforce re-skilling. The institute plans to award two $250,000 seed grants in each category and scale up promising efforts into multi-year, multimillion-dollar labs.
Beyond applied A.I., Konwinski’s institute will also invest in what he calls “foundational work that advances computing itself.” Its first major grant in this area will provide $3 million annually over five years to establish a new A.I. lab at the University of California, Berkeley. The AI Systems Lab, expected to open by 2027, will be led by a team of prominent researchers including Ion Stoica, Matei Zaharia, Joey Gonzalez and Raluca-Ada Popa.
Konwinski’s past ventures in A.I. have been highly successful. In 2022, he co-founded Perplexity AI, the A.I.-powered search engine now valued at $14 billion. More than a decade earlier, he helped launch Databricks, which reached a $62 billion valuation earlier this year. In 2024, he also founded Laude Ventures, a venture capital firm focused on early-stage tech startups, and introduced a $1 million prize to encourage innovation around an A.I. coding benchmark.
With the Laude Institute, Konwinski aims to create a platform that funds, convenes and elevates the work of computer scientists. “For years, I’ve wanted to build something that would help more researchers take that journey from idea to impact,” he said. “Our goal is simple: get more world-changing research into people’s hands.”
