Our team also leads Astera’s Residency program, supports independent Fellows, explores and funds new opportunities, and drives events and other ecosystem-supporting efforts.
We think about grants and investments as a continuum rather than a binary.
Most foundations have an external grant-making function. At Astera, we also do grants when appropriate, but we believe we can increase philanthropic capital efficiency by structuring some of our programmatic expenditures as investments. With a grant, we lose 100% of our capital 100% of the time—with investments, sometimes we return capital that we can then redeploy for philanthropic purposes.
For-profit companies are a major vector for social and technological change, and a tool that nonprofits can use to achieve their charitable objectives. By removing the artificial constraints most foundations erect internally between grant-making and investment functions, we hope to make our existing philanthropic dollars go farther.
Occasionally, Astera identifies exceptional thinkers or creatives that we believe need flexibility and time to reach their potential. Below are our current Fellows who we typically support for several years so that they may pursue their projects with maximum autonomy.
Impact through openness
stera exists to get to the future, faster, and few things have the power to accelerate that progress like science. But science requires many people building on each other’s work, and current sharing practices leave much of the underlying science unavailable or unusable. We treat how science is shared as a research problem in its own right, and we experiment with solutions in the open, including on behalf of those who can’t or won’t.
Astera time and funds will never go toward journal publications. Everything we fund is released openly, as a record others can build on.
Read more about working in the open here.