Funding and Grants
The FOSS United grants program aims to provide financial support to FOSS creators,
maintainers, projects and events all over India. To date, we have disbursed over INR 3
crores towards Indian FOSS projects and maintainers. All FOSS United grantees are
listed on the grantees page.
We fund FOSS projects by raising funds from the tech industry, either through our
Industry Partnership Program, individual donations, or by reaching out to companies
that might be interested in co-sponsoring certain projects or organizations.
To read more about the structure of the grants program, evaluation criteria and more, please go through our grants thesis.
If you're a FOSS project or developer in need of financial support, please apply for a grant. For any questions, please reach out to us at events@fossunited.org (for Events) or grants@fossunited.org (for Projects) respectively.
Project Grants
Project grants are largely “non-thematic”. In the past, we have funded developer tools, consumer apps, non-profit foundations, FOSS mirrors, Open Hardware projects, individual contributors, and even new programming languages!
Recent Grants
FOSS training program for underprivileged communities
Webminal is a free, browser-based Linux terminal and learning platform running since 2011 on a single server with 8GB RAM. It provides real shell access (not a simulation) for students to learn Linux commands, system administration, and programming.
Surge is a high-performance, open-source download manager built for power users, combining multi-connection and multi-mirror acceleration, smart chunking, failover handling, resumable downloads, and live progress tracking for much faster and more reliable file transfers. It also offers a polished terminal UI, headless server mode, CLI automation, and browser extension support, making it easy to manage downloads interactively or integrate them into automated workflows.
CogniCraft 2026 is a four week event with two-day residential TechX innovation experience hosted at Rajagiri School of Engineering and Technology (RSET), Kochi. Dedicated exclusively to designing cognitive assistive technologies for neurodivergent individuals, CogniCraft bridges engineering design, software development, clinical rehabilitation, and human-centered problem solving. Moving beyond traditional hackathon models, CogniCraft integrates expert keynotes, hands-on rapid prototyping, 3D printing workshops, panel discussions, and community-building campfire sessions on the RSET campus before participants embark on a signature Buildathon aboard the Kochi Water Metro. This event acts as the official launch platform for the CogniCraft Innovation Initiative under the IEEE Kerala ATII Group, establishing a sustainable roadmap to transition student concepts into locally manufacturable, low-cost assistive products supported by K-DISC STRIDE.
* We are planning to host the first ever, vendor neutral, tool/technology agnostic conference, dedicated to open source tools and engineering practice. * We are anticipating a footfall of roughly 600 folks, predominantly working professionals and CXOs from the region. * We are attempting to bring all/most of the kube astronaut/Golden kube astronauts together. * We have already received more than 60 talk proposals from companies like AWS, Intuit, Red Hat and also from startups like Drdroid, One2N. To our surprise we have received proposals from students from IITs, GSOC projects. * We have a proven track record in doing conferences and community organizations and have done conferences like CloudXAI, Global Azure Conference (Kolkata), GDG Cloud etc.
Linux Diary 7.0 is an exciting event organized by the Walchand Linux Users' Group (WLUG) where we cover topics ranging from Basic to Advanced Linux and Networking. It is one of the most anticipated technology events at Walchand College of Engineering, Sangli, Linux Diary 7 .0 has consistently drawn a large audience, including students, faculty, and tech enthusiasts.
This grant supports Soham's work on ROCm backporting, GPU benchmarking, and reproducible Linux GPU-compute workflows for older AMD hardware.
Fellowship to support Muneer's work on improving design across the open source ecosystem.