[Announcement] We desire your Brains in 2026
Now accepting applications to start accelerating ideas for FROs, ARPA Programs, and more!
tl;dr: Brains is a four-month, nights-and-weekends bootcamp to accelerate amazing scientists starting world-changing research programs that are beyond the scope of both individual academic labs and VC-funded startups; things like ARPA programs, focused research organizations, or something entirely new.
You can apply here. Applications close on November 18th. For more details, see the FAQ here or read on!
This is a repost of a piece we published last year about the idea behind Brains and how it works, with some updates based on a year’s worth of lessons and progress.
Why an accelerator for coordinated research programs?
The idea behind Brains is simple: pave a “third path” for talented scientists to start potentially game-changing research programs that are poor fits for both startups and academic labs.
This kind of big-if-true but still pre-commercial work unlocked much of the modern world — from the Internet to mRNA vaccines. Riding in Waymo cars still feels like the future; autonomous vehicles got a huge boost from the DARPA Grand and Urban Challenges — both were ambitious research programs beyond the scope of a single company or lab.
Over time, these programs have proliferated — in government ARPAs (Advanced Research Projects Agencies) like ARPA-H, ARIA, ARPA-E, IARPA on top of the OG DARPA, at nonprofit organizations like Convergent Research and Spectech, and through programs that are either affiliated with foundations or are entirely independent.
However, many scientists still only see two possible paths to turn an idea that needs coordinated group effort into reality: starting an academic lab or a startup. Neither of those is wrong, but many ideas are poor fits for either of those institutional boxes. Even for people who know that coordinated research programs exist as a third path (like many of you reading this!) the pathway to starting one and running it successfully is opaque.
Starting and running both startups and academic labs is hard but there are straightforward ways to learn how to do it: as a grad student or postdoc, you can watch what your PI does; you can work for a startup and learn from the CEO. Libraries’ worth of writing has gone into the experience of being a founder or a professor. There are hundreds of universities, venture capital firms, and startup accelerators with open applications.
By contrast, starting an ARPA program or an FRO is an opaque process demanding a skillset that is hard to pick up through other professional experience: a combination of hustle, vision, pragmatism, sales, and organization. This skillset is hard to compress into an interview or test, so it’s hard to know if someone will be good at leading a program until they’ve led a program. In high-uncertainty situations like this, funders and hiring managers fall back on heuristics like credentials and networks instead of evaluating people and ideas on their merits.
It’s a market failure: on one side scientists don’t know that running a program is an option and don’t know how to get started even if they do; on the other side, it’s hard for ARPAs and other organizations to know whether people will be good at running programs without pre-existing relationships.
Today, a lot of potentially awesome program leads cram their ideas into poorly shaped institutional structures or abandon them all together; ARPAs and other organizations find themselves “fishing from the same small pond” of people they’ve worked with before — missing out on great talent and ideas.
So where does Brains come in?
You can think Brains as performing several roles:
Putting up a signal flare for people who might be great program leads. (Like this post!)
Primary filtering (that’s the application and interview process)
A crash course in the skills people need to successfully run programs
1:1 mentoring to help fellows get ideas as close to “shovel ready” as possible
Building a supportive community of peers and advisors
Connecting the two sides of the marketplace.
Over time, we’re hoping to do for ARPA programs, FROs, and other coordinated research programs what YC and other accelerators did for startups. Starting and working at startups went from an obscure pursuit that was hard to get into unless you knew the right people to a normalized (if still high-variance) path for people all over the world.
We believe that the market for coordinated research programs is elastic: as more people start them and get results, more people and organizations will want to fund and support them. And we’re starting to see this hypothesis play out!
Since the first cohort of fellows graduated a year a half ago, they have gone on to start coordinated research programs that in total have more than $40 million committed from philanthropists and governments. The 2025 cohort has a ton of exciting work in the pipeline and the AI fellows will be unveiling their programs at showcase soon. And we’re just getting started.
Onwards!
The 2026 Brains cohort will run from February through June 2026. If you have a deep technical background and an ambitious idea, we encourage you to apply!
An ideal fellow:
Has a deep technical background, has done the equivalent of PhD-level research, and has several years of work experience.
Has one or more ambitious but precise ideas that don’t fit into existing institutions.
Has worked both inside and outside of academia.
Has a strong bias towards action.
Is comfortable with acting under uncertainty.
Of course, there are exceptions to every rule, especially on the frontiers of human capabilities, so people who don’t exactly fit this profile should still apply if they think they can crush it!
So:
If you or anybody you know has what it takes — you can find the application here.
If you have more questions, you have several options:
You can check out the FAQ here.
We’re going to be doing online info sessions on October 16 at 12p ET and November 5 at 8p ET.
You can email questions to brains@spec.tech.
If you want to get involved outside of being a fellow — please do reach out at brains@spec.tech.
We’re excited to help make your awesome ideas a reality.
Huge congratulations! This is going to be a great step for people who appreciate the FRO or other r&d model, but may not know where to start or don't want to operate under a large institution. I know plenty of younger scientists, for whom this type of flexibility would be greatly beneficial.
Hats off to Ben and team!