Blog / Grants

FOSS United Grants - 2025

A recap of the FOSS United grants we gave out in 2025 and our future plans

January 20, 2026 · 6 min read

2025 was an interesting year for the FOSS United Foundation in many ways. We started new programs ( forklore.in, Season of Commits), organised and participated in more events, and received increased media coverage. We also organised the biggest ever and a self-sustaining IndiaFOSS. We believe that the success of these initiatives is an indicator of the overall health of the growing FOSS ecosystem in India. For example, 11 out of 18 IndiaFOSS sponsors this year were Open Source companies.

A significant increase in grant activity and the number of projects showcased at events (and on the forum) this year indicates that Indian developers are becoming increasingly interested in building FOSS. We find this a new development, and the trends here are worth sharing with the community.

Through 2025, along with the community, we’ve also been able to draft and refine the FOSS United Grants Thesis. Check out the final version here.

The grants program

The FOSS United grants program aims to provide financial support to FOSS projects and events all over India. To date, we have disbursed over INR 2.5 crores ($110K approximately) towards Indian FOSS projects and maintainers. We have a 25L yearly grants budget that is split across project and event grants. Note that the budget is set across financial years (April 2025 - April 2026), and for the purpose of this post, we will mention the grants that were disbursed in 2025 (Jan-Dec). The total figure may include some ongoing grants from the previous year, as well as some that have yet to be disbursed.

In this calendar year, we received almost 200 grant requests. Around 20% of those requests were for direct FOSS work - project grants, infrastructure grants, fellowships, research funding; and the remaining 150+ were events.

Out of these, we approved 28 grants throughout the year. Here is a list of our grantees and fellows from 2025, along with grant amounts -

Project Grants (Jan- Dec 2025)

Project	Grant Amount (INR)	Notes
FLOSSbOxIN	30,000
VGLUG Foundation	5,00,000
Malhar	3,00,000
Zasper	9,00,000	Co-sponsor - Zerodha
CircuitVerse	1,00,000
Albony Mirror	50,000
Project Segfault	20,000

Fellowships (Jan- Dec 2025)

Fellow(s)	Grant Amount (INR)	Details
Advay and Aarav	18,000	Blender Kannada Tutorials Series
Ansh Arora	30,000	Policy in Action Program by Young Leaders in Active Citizenship (YLAC). Ansh was provided a grant to cover for partial travel expenses and course fees.
Arpit Tripathi	1,20,000	Research Project - Balancing Innovation and Risk Management in Open-Source Adoption for Critical Sectors
Prerak Singh	75,000	Working on PyDataStructs for the inaugural Season of Commits (2025)
contrapunctus	3,60,000	Supporting the OpenStreetMap(OSM) community mapping parties across the country. A 90K INR initial grant was provided to Contrapunctus for 3 months, which was later extended for the entire year.
Graduate Course in Public Policy by The Takshashila Institution		2025 fellows - Aswin B., Akshit T., Mahesh R., Navadeep U., Ashutosh P., Barkha M., Anmol M., Azan	3,10,000	The scholarship amount comes out of our Policy budget and is not included in the grants pool currently.

All the event grants are listed on fossunited.org/grants

Miscellaneous grants (Jan- Dec 2025)

Grant	Grant Amount (INR)	Notes
Ente@FOSDEM	1,00,000	We have provided a travel grant to Anand and Laurens to showcase Ente at our exhibit booth at FOSDEM 2026.
RethinkDNS@FOSDEM	1,00,000	We have provided a travel grant to Murtaza and Hussain to showcase RethinkDNS at our exhibit booth at FOSDEM 2026.
Zasper@FOSDEM	1,00,000	We have provided a travel grant to Prasun Anand to showcase Zasper at our exhibit booth at FOSDEM 2026.
FOSS4G Asia	25,000	We provided a diversity grant to FOSS4G Asia to enable participants from the FOSS community to participate in the event.
State of the Map Kerala	25,000	We provided a diversity grant to SOTM Kerala to enable participants from the FOSS community to participate in the event.
Avikalp Kumar Gupta (Vibinex @ Ubucon India 2025)	25,000	At Ubucon India 2025, we sponsored an exhibit booth for Avikalp to showcase his project, Vibinex, at the event.

Travel grants to events, diversity support and exhibit sponsorships are new experiments that we started this year. Our rationale behind these miscellaneous grants is outlined in the grants thesis.

Grants Allotment (FY 25-26)

Grant	Grant Amount (INR)	Notes
Projects	15,95,000	Direct support to maintainers and/or infrastructure funding
Fellowships	3,33,000	Direct support to FOSS creators and contributors
Events	2,13,000	Grants to FOSS events for managing costs, prizes, etc.
Miscellaneous grants	3,75,000	Travel grants, diversity funding, and exhibit sponsorships for FOSS projects
Total	25,11,000	April 2025 - Present

* Amounts are rounded off for simplicity

* Only amounts that were disbursed in this financial year (April 2025-Present) are mentioned here.

We have exhausted the 25L grants budget we had set for the grants program last April. We are expecting to receive many more grant requests in the next few months, and estimate an overall deficit of INR 3-5L in the grants program.

Note that the mentioned figures include only the payments that happened post-April (some of these grants may have been approved earlier and received payments before April 2025).This also includes some disbursements from older grants that continued this FY. These funds are split across the following categories-

This supports our hypothesis that more than 80% of our grants budget is allocated towards direct FOSS funding through projects and fellowships ( which is 20% of the requests).

What’s next

We have received 10+ grant applications just in the last 2 months, some of which may get approved in early 2026. Our grants budget for the year is nearing a close, and we may hold on to some applications that come in the next few months until the next FY. We will take that time to catch up with grantees, discuss shortcomings and future plans, and continue working on other interesting programs we want to start this year.

I would also like to inform the community that starting Jan 2026, I will be working on “Maintainer Programs” at FOSS United Foundation.

Maintainer Programs

In May 2025, we launched Meet the Maintainers as part of Maintainers May. The idea was to highlight 31 FOSS maintainers from India for the entire month. While it sounds simple now, we weren’t very sure that we could find so many Indian maintainers when we started the campaign.

Sure enough, things got out of hand, and we found many more maintainers than there were days in the month. That led to forklore, a directory of Indian FOSS maintainers. And Meet the Maintainers never ended, we continue to bring you one story every week on #ForkloreFridays and have featured over 60 FOSS maintainers from India so far on forklore.

Many more Indians are now building FOSS, and this growth in maintainer activity is why we felt the need to expand our approach beyond financial support. The Maintainer Programs initiative by FOSS United Foundation will subsume grants, forklore.in, and other maintainer-adjacent programs and projects we’ve been running over the past. This is an effort to support Indian FOSS maintainers across the following areas:

Discoverability - Giving a platform to Indian FOSS projects and helping them find potential users, contributors, customers, hires, and even investors! We want to help these projects get more eyeballs through our events, social media channels, media coverage, etc. We will also help projects showcase at external events through sponsorships and travel grants.
Sustainability - This extends beyond the financial sustainability that the grants program offers. We will offer trainings for maintainers on security, accessibility, compliance, etc., and enable projects to conduct thorough audits regularly. We’ll also form partnerships with companies that can help us organise some of these trainings, provide infrastructure support (cloud credits) and hardware, join us as co-sponsors for grants, and more. All of this is crucial for long term sustainability of the projects.
Community - We will help these projects build their own communities, run FOSS contribution programs, and promote more interaction and knowledge sharing amongst the Indian maintainer community.

More updates on this will follow soon. These efforts will also be supplemented by the upcoming Grants Working Group. If you are a maintainer who has any ideas or thoughts, or a company that would like to partner with us, or just want to chat, please drop us an email at maintainers@fossunited.org.