What is the future missing?
A video portrait from 2025 + happy holidays from our team to you and yours
It’s been an incredibly exciting year in metascience at large, and for us at Convergent.
Last week, the National Science Foundation announced their Tech Labs Initiative.
The Future of Focused Research Organizations:
tl;dr: If you’re drafting an NSF Tech Labs RFI response around a team-built public good that removes a major bottleneck in a field, we’re happy to talk. Convergent has incubated 10+ FROs (and learned a lot in the process) and can help pressure-test whether your idea is “FRO-shaped,” and, if it is, explore partnering (including potentially referencing yo…
The week before, we joined teams from our UK FRO Founder Residency (powered by ARIA) in London as they presented the proposals they’ve been working on since June.
Inside the UK FRO Founder Residency with ARIA
At Convergent, we match founders, funders, and ideas to help tackle the critical bottlenecks slowing down scientific and technological progress. We do this through a new type of scientific institution - the focused research organization, or FRO - a non-profit startup that we help design, launch, and operate. Each FRO is a time-bound, technically ambitio…
All year, our existing Focused Research Organizations (we’ve launched almost a dozen) have been sharing the fruits of their labor, and we’re hard at work on many more new FROs in the pipeline.
And this October, like we do every year, we brought our Focused Research Organization leaders, team members, and supporters together for FROCon.
Over a few cold, bright, autumnal days in Falmouth, we shared breakthroughs & challenges, identified opportunities for collaboration, and reconnected amidst the day-to-day busy-ness of pursuing our mission.
And while we were all in one place, we took a few hours to pull some members of the team aside, to ask them some questions about what we’re working on, and why.
Here’s the video we made about Convergent:
We hope it is a useful artifact for understanding our work, and a helpful preview for what’s to come.
This year has been a big one, and next year will be even more so.
We’re so excited about what’s to come, and grateful for everyone who’s joined us along the way.
Happy holidays - from our team to you and yours.
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Congrats on a great year! Excited to see what you have in store in 2026