After much anticipation, we’re proud to announce the results of the first BGI Nexus Grant Round and to celebrate ten groundbreaking projects that our global community has collectively prioritized for funding.

The BGI Nexus is a global community dedicated to advancing beneficial AI and AGI through collaborative development, transparent governance, and aligned resourcing. Together, we’re working to ensure that the growing power of AI is directed toward the flourishing of humanity, the biosphere, and future generations.

This first funding round invited proposals under the theme of “Building a Compassionate and Abundant Future.” What we received exceeded every expectation — 91 submissions from across disciplines, cultures, and regions, offering AI-driven solutions to human, social, ecological, and structural challenges.

With a total of $500,000 available, and grants of up to $50,000 per project, this round was designed not only to fund important work, but also to experiment with new methods of collective prioritization. The ten awarded projects reflect both technical promise and deep alignment with BGI values, and rose to the top through a transparent process grounded in community wisdom, thoughtful review, and decentralized decision-making.

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From Proposals to Priorities: How the Round Worked

This pilot round was a test of decentralized collaboration bringing together a globally distributed community to propose, evaluate, and collectively prioritize the most promising beneficial AI initiatives.

Here’s how it unfolded:

• 91 proposals were submitted from around the world, spanning health, climate, governance, education, inclusive technologies, and more
• Over 70 volunteer community experts participated in the review process, evaluating proposals for alignment with the BGI Nexus vision, ethical and safety considerations, potential for impact, and degree of innovation
• A parallel technical feasibility assessment was conducted by reviewers from Deep Funding to ensure each project and project team’s readiness to build
• Based on these reviews, 25 proposals were deemed eligible and advanced to the final voting phase
• In the final stage, the broader public participated in a pairwise comparison voting process. In total, 9,036 pairwise comparisons were cast by 1,177 unique voter ids in the final voting phase. Each voter compared proposals two at a time, and through this simple act of judgment, the community helped produce a robust and nuanced prioritization of the proposals.

This structure allowed for deep engagement from subject-matter experts, while inviting broad participation from anyone aligned with the BGI mission — making it not just a funding process, but a living experiment in community-led AI governance.

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How the Final Rankings Were Calculated

The final leaderboard combined two complementary components, per the round rules:

• 60% Community Review Score: Based on the summed impact and innovation scores from expert community reviewers
• 40% Community Voting Outcome: Derived using an ELO 60-shuffle system which is a robust comparative method based on paired voting across 60 randomized iterations to mitigate chronological or other bias

To ensure fairness across scoring ranges, both components were normalized using Z-score scaling, and weighted to reflect their contribution to the final outcome. This balance ensured that both thoughtful expert evaluation and community prioritization shaped the funding decisions.

Data Integrity & Vote Cleaning

As part of our analysis, we also reviewed the vote data for signs of excessive repeat participation. The PollUnit platform includes a built-in system to flag clusters of suspicious votes based on a number of combined factors such as browser, IP, and behavior patterns which can indicate potential gaming.

While we allowed open participation and did not restrict individuals from voting more than once, some participants appeared to submit between 12 and 50 vote sessions each, far beyond what we would expect from organic participation, and also creating significant noise. To preserve the integrity of the rankings, we created a cleaned dataset by removing the most extreme and clearly coordinated voting blocks of approximately 2,500 out of 11,500 total pairwise comparisons.

This filtered dataset, which we believe better reflects the collective intent of the community, was used to calculate the final rankings.

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The Winning Proposals

Congratulations to the following ten proposals, which emerged as top community priorities. Each project listed below received a grant (amount in parentheses) and a huge vote of confidence from the BGI community.

1. Farmlingua – Team Farmlingua ($45,000)
   Multilingual AI for smallholder farmers
2. Think Inclusion Conferencing App – Remo Start ($45,000)
   Inclusive design for global events
3. Sign Language Translator AI (SLTA) – Khasyahfr ($50,000)
   AI-powered sign language translation
4. Project Lovelock – Living Libraries Network (LLN) – River Roberts ($48,888)
   Decentralized ecological knowledge repositories
5. GlucoseDAO – Livia Zaharia ($50,000)
   Open health and glucose data
6. BIONEXUS GAIA: AI for Regenerative Biodiversity – Clement ($50,000)
   AI for biodiversity regeneration
7. AURORA: Decentralised AI for Carbon Credit Trust – Bob Weihai He ($50,000)
   Decentralized AI for climate trust
8. Acropolis OS – Autonomous Community AGI – Fluran ($50,000)
   AGI for autonomous communities
9. NigerGuard:AI Climate Resilience-Vulnerable States – Ladybriggy2025 ($46,000)
   AI for climate resilience in vulnerable regions
10. Productivity EEG-AI Agents – Rakesh Jakati ($50,000)
    Brain-signal-powered productivity agents

Full list of priority rankings and complete calculations can be found here.

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By the Numbers – A snapshot of BGI Nexus Grant Round 01:

• 👉 91 proposals submitted from across the globe
• 👉 70+ volunteer reviewers participated in community review
• 👉 25 proposals selected as eligible for voting
• 👉 1,177 unique voter ids participated in the community voting phase
• 👉 9,036 pairwise comparisons cast in total
• 👉 Every Proposal included in 660 to 779 pairwise comparisons 
• 👉 Every proposal voted on by between 499-593 different (anonymized) voter IDs
• 👉 10 winning projects prioritized for impact, innovation, and alignment with a beneficial future

See Full Details of Community Review rankings, Pairwise Voting, Voting Statistics, ELO-60 Shuffle Calculation and data-shufflings used, and final Z-Score ranking on the “Final Priority Results” spreadsheet.

A Collective Thank You

This grant round was only possible because of the energy, wisdom, and care of our partners and community.

We extend our deepest gratitude to the Deep Funding team and circles, who provided guidance, support and technical insight throughout the process; to the more than 70 community reviewers who contributed their expertise with thoughtfulness and care; to the proposal teams, who stepped forward with bold, actionable visions for beneficial AI; and to the voters and supporters across the globe who showed up with heart and intention to help shape this moment.

To mark the close of this pilot round, Ben Goertzel, CEO of SingularityNET and visionary behind the BGI Nexus initiative, shared these reflections:

“I am beyond thrilled to see the fantastic assemblage of ambitious, realistic, good-hearted projects that have emerged from the participatory decision process of this recent BGI Nexus funding round.   It has always been key to SingularityNET’s mandate to help actualize creative thinking regarding the use of decentralized AGI for the betterment of the human species and our environment. With AGI coming ever closer at remarkable speed, now is the time to bring reality to all our exciting visions of beneficial AI.

“I am also aware there were many very worthy applications that didn’t get funded in this round, and that the experimental community decision process used had strengths and weaknesses — we will do further and larger BGI Nexus oriented funding rounds, and we will continue to learn and experiment regarding the practicalities of decentralized decision-making. We will move step by step toward realizing our vision of beneficial decentralized AGI, and I believe this first BGI Nexus funding round will constitute a significant step. Much gratitude to all who have participated and will continue to participate!”  

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What’s Next

The ten winning projects will now begin the hard and joyful work of building! As they complete each milestone, their funding will be released to them per their budget, enabling these projects to grow and thrive. We look forward to sharing updates on their progress at the BGI Summit in October, where many will be featured alongside researchers, entrepreneurs, and changemakers shaping the path toward beneficial AGI.

We were so inspired by the many thematic overlaps and shared values among proposals; and as a next step the BGI Nexus will be launching a set of topic-oriented working groups this year that can help define future round parameters. These working groups will explore and shape the future of funding, coordination, and development in a variety of domains of beneficial AI.

To everyone who submitted, voted, reviewed, supported, and followed along, we would like to express our deep gratitude. Please stay in touch by subscribing on the BGI Nexus website and joining the Telegram Group to be notified of upcoming working group sessions. We hope to see you in the next round and the upcoming community convergences.