Schmidt Futures has announced the launch of the Schmidt Futures Network, a program aimed at helping Schmidt Futures recipients expand their coalition of partners and diversity funding sources to scale promising early-stage initiatives.

Convergent Research, the network's first initiative, is designed to remedy gaps in the research and development ecosystem by identifying high-impact scientific or technological R&D opportunities, then defining and launching these projects as Focused Research Organizations (FROs). According to Schmidt Futures, some global challenges — such as brain mapping, climate technology, biological tool and reagent development, data generation for preventative medicine, novel antibiotic development, and nanofabrication — often cannot be efficiently addressed by the existing organizational structures of academia, industry, or government. To address the issue, Convergent Research FROs will work to solve scientific and technological challenges that require the systematic scale, unity, and purpose of a startup, while solving problems in fundamental research for the public benefit.

The first FROs will include E11 bio, which is dedicated to brain mapping technology and established to develop tools for understanding how the brain is wired in order to mitigate disease and accelerate brain science, and Cultivarium, dedicated to synthetic biology in non-model organisms and established to make the world’s diverse microorganisms accessible for use in beneficial synthetic biology technologies.