Andy Konwinski, co-founder of Databricks and Perplexity AI, launches $100M research institute focused on beneficial AI

Databricks Inc. co-founder and Apache Spark creator Andy Konwinski this week announced the creation of a new artificial intelligence research institute called Laude that’s backed with $100 million of his own cash.

The computer scientist said in a June 23 blog post that Laude Institute intends to support AI research that has the most potential for broad, positive impacts on humanity. “This is the most personal project of my life, and it’s been a long time coming,” Konwinski said.

Konwinski (pictured, second from right), who is also the co-founder of Perplexity AI Inc., said Laude Institute has hired a number of prominent AI researchers, including Chris Rytting, K. Tighe, Justin Fiedler and Lindsey Gregory. Its board of directors includes personalities such as the Turing Award winner David Patterson, Google DeepMind Chief Scientist Jeff Dean, and Joelle Pineau, former head of AI research at Meta Platforms Inc.

To begin with, Laude Institute will kick off with two separate initiatives. The first is called Slingshots, a project that offers small, fast-track grants to early-stage AI projects in partnership with researchers from Stanford University. It has already backed the creation of a new benchmark for AI agents that can automate business work. That benchmark was later referenced by Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei in May when it launched its latest large language model, Claude 4.

As for the second initiative, called Moonshots, it aims to provide significantly larger grants to AI research labs that aim to tackle some of humanity’s toughest challenges. Konwinski said it’s focused on projects targeting areas such as healthcare, workforce reskilling, scientific discovery and civic discourse, and plans to award two seed grants of $250,000 in each category.

In addition, Konwinski said the institute will look to invest in “foundational work” that advances the computing industry, and it has already doled out a substantial grant to the new AI Systems Lab at the University of California at Berkeley. It will provide $3 million annually to the new lab for five years, he said. It’s expected to open in 2027, and will be led by a number of prominent AI researchers and computer scientists, including two of Konwinski’s co-founders at Databricks, Ion Stoica and Matei Zaharia.

“We exist to catalyze work that doesn’t just push the field forward but guides it towards more beneficial outcomes,” Konwinski wrote. “We help get ideas out of the lab and into the world by giving the right resources to the right researchers at the right time.”

Konwinski has been extremely successful in his previous AI endeavors. He co-founded Databricks more than a decade ago after helping develop the open-source data processing platform Apache Spark, which has become a foundational technology for thousands of enterprises. Databricks has since emerged as one of the major players in AI, reaching a valuation of $62 billion following a mammoth $10 billion funding round earlier this year.

More recently, Konwinski co-founded Perplexity AI, the generative AI search engine that has achieved a $14 billion valuation and set off alarm bells at Google LLC. Last year, he founded Laude Ventures, a venture capital firm focused on early-stage startups and a kind of sister organization to Laude Institute.

Though Laude Ventures is much more of a commercial organization, Laude Institute is more interested in funding projects that will be beneficial to everyone.

“For years, I’ve wanted to build something that would help more researchers take that journey from idea to impact,” Konwinski wrote. “Our goal is simple: get more world-changing research into people’s hands.”

Photo: Laude Institute