The Vashisht Institute Fellowship

What it is

Not a cohort. Not a year-long stipend. A rolling grant program that pays mostly in tokens and travel, decides in days, and renews on shipped work. Fellows publish through the Institute and get its research and method stack in return.

Four lanes

Compute Fellow — $500–$2,500 in API credits against a stated build or research plan. Highest volume, fastest decision.

Build Fellow — $1,000–$5,000 in cash and credits to finish a tool, agent, dataset, or skill. Ships open-source under an Institute byline.

Field Fellow — $1,000–$5,000 in travel and capture costs for fieldwork. Output is footage, interviews, or a corpus the Institute can build on.

Scholar Fellow — $1,000–$5,000 research bounty on a named question from the Institute's own agenda. Output is an essay published on this site.

How it works

1. Apply with a thing, not a CV: a repo, a running agent, a draft, a reel, a dataset. Two paragraphs on what the money unlocks.
2. Decisions within 14 days. Yes, no, or one round of questions.
3. First tranche is cheap to win. A second tranche requires a delivered artifact. No multi-year obligations in either direction.
4. Everything funded is listed on the public ledger: name, lane, amount, output. Anonymity is available on request; the amount is always public.
5. Fellows keep access to the Institute's lab — corpora, frameworks, method stack — after the grant ends. The obligation to ship does not.

Timeline

Applications open now. First grants disburse Q1 2027, once the Institute's grant-making entity is in place. Early applicants are reviewed first.

Apply

Email [email protected] with subject line Fellowship — [Lane] — [Your name] and include:

• Link to the thing (repo, doc, video, dataset, deployed agent)
• Which lane, and the amount requested
• Two paragraphs: what this unlocks, and what you will ship
• Where you are based (for Field Fellows: where you need to go)