FAQ

What do you look for in an expedition?

We look for upstream clarity: evidence of reframed questions, grounded novelty, and catalytic potential. Our grantees often challenge the framing of a field before offering solutions. We don't require credentials, we look for patterns of novel insight. Some of the strongest applicants have little to no formal background in the field they're reshaping. Our key metrics include surprisal (does this open new surface area for discovery?), readiness (is the moment right to accelerate it?), and field-building (could this unlock the adjacent possible or reshape a domain?)

Do I have to be a scientist or founder to be supported?

No. We've backed independent theorists, builders, and unconventional thinkers at all stages. If you're working on a question that doesn't neatly belong anywhere else, you might belong here. We care more about how you see than what title you carry. We believe explorers can emerge from any background, as long as the work is real and holds evidence of promise.

What's wrong with how research and innovation are currently funded?

Most existing systems optimize for legibility, not possibility. Academia rewards specialization and consensus. Venture capital demands scalable proof before upstream work has time to take form. This leaves entire classes of questions: cross-domain, early-stage, and unconventional, without support. Analogue exists to fund those questions.

You can explore our critique and alternative model in the Library, especially our pieces The Paradox of Progress and Rethinking Funding: Beyond VC, Academia, and Philantropy.

How are you different from academic grants, VC, or think tanks?

We're none of the above. Analogue is building a new institutional form: a fund for the epistemically ambitious.

Like grants, we're non-dilutive, but we don't require institutional affiliation, impact projections, or years of preliminary data. Like venture capital, we move quickly and fund at moments of inflection, but we don't demand immediate 10x financial returns. Like think tanks, we care about ideas and their consequences, but we don't operate on consensus timelines.

We exist for the kinds of people and questions that current systems miss: reframers working upstream of application, across domains, or ahead of language. Many of the most important ideas don't look fundable at first—they look illegible. We're building the judgment, scaffolding, and cultural infrastructure to meet them anyway.

How long is an expedition?

We don't impose fixed timelines – temporal flexibility is core to our approach. Some expeditions take a few months; others evolve over years. We care more about the rhythm of the work than the calendar. We fund when something needs momentum and stay flexible as it unfolds.

What do explorers receive?

At the Expeditions stage, Explorers receive non-dilutive grants to test their thesis at a small and tractable scale, whether that's prototyping a tool, publishing a foundational piece, or running an early experiment. Projects may receive follow-on funding as the work matures.

Beyond capital, Explorers are brought into a growing community of upstream thinkers. This includes media amplification (such as features on the Friends of Analogue podcast), participation in private salons and strategic discourse, and access to future ecosystem initiatives like Pods and Advances. We don't prescribe outcomes—we build scaffolding around people already doing the work.

What are the different Analogue projects and how do they relate to the fund?

The Expedition Fund is our grantmaking arm, but it sits inside a larger ecosystem designed to make early insight legible, supported, and contagious. We also run salons, publish essays, and produce longform media as core infrastructure. Early-stage ideas often die from isolation, not lack of capital. Our ecosystem exists to surface overlooked work, give them room to grow, be tested, and eventually shift the conversation.

Analogue is an early-stage experiment in and of itself, and we're evolving alongside the work we support. More forms of financing, grants, and institutional scaffolding are on the horizon. This includes follow-on funding mechanisms, collaborative Pods, and future institutional prototypes.