This post isn’t just about Deep Funding’s plans for 2025—it’s also a look at a significant phase-shift in our life-cycle. This change began in the second half of 2024 and, if all goes well, it will carry us far beyond 2025. January seems like the perfect time to reflect on strategy, so let’s dive in.
Looking Back
Over the past three years, what began as a small initiative with a handful of part-time contributors has grown steadily. We’ve seen more proposals, more people involved, and more sophisticated tools and processes.
In the last 18 months especially, we’ve:
- Launched our platform: Transitioning from the third-party tool “Swae” to our own platform, we’ve gained flexibility and scalability.
- Introduced a Circle structure: Instead of expanding our full-time staff, we’ve built a system of Circles—groups of part-time contributors from our community who manage specific areas.
- Streamlined backend processes: New tools have improved efficiency, and we’re constantly refining them to meet our community’s needs.
These efforts are still ongoing. There’s a pipeline of features we’re working on for the platform, new Circles being formed, and plans to upgrade our backend tools. But all of these initiatives aren’t just goals in themselves—they’re stepping stones to broader growth and diversification.
Let’s review our strategic goals, aimed at growth by diversification.
Diversifying Funding Methods
We’re expanding our funding mechanisms to support a wider range of developers, entrepreneurs, and projects. The goal isn’t just growth in numbers, but also in the quality and diversity of our community.
Here’s how we’re approaching it:
- Deep Funding Rounds: Focused on decentralization and community engagement.
- RFPs (Requests for Proposals): Designed to deliver high-quality, usable results.
- RFP Ideation: A new process to crowdsource ideas and involve the community in shaping RFPs.
- Open Challenges: Low-friction, fast funding for top teams with innovative, time-sensitive ideas.
For more background on our funding diversification approach, check out ‘The Funding Trilemma’.
Diversifying Communities
This is a newer direction, and we have yet to see how successful this will be in the current format. But the potential for decentralized community growth is exciting.
We recently launched an RFP inviting members to create their own Deep Funding Community Hubs. Initially, we envisioned these as regional hubs, but the possibilities are much broader—hubs could be built around themes like sustainability, robotics, or ethics, or even connect students from specific universities. There’s a lot of room to innovate here.
New funding sources; Deep Funding as a platform
We’re also looking at ways to bring in new funding sources through our systems:
- Co-funding initiatives: These could include RFPs, ideation campaigns, hackathons, or other options.
- Community Hubs: As they mature, hubs might secure their own funding sources.
- Partner-driven initiatives: Eventually, third parties could fund their own projects on our platform. These would still align with our broader mission but wouldn’t necessarily be limited by our specific goals such as ‘Helping the Decentralized AI-Platform grow’. They would also have full freedom in selecting the winning proposals.
Scalability
All of this depends on scaling up.
Our platform might at some point need to handle multiple Funding Rounds at the same time, which would require significant upgrades. Backend automation is another focus—we’re aiming for major improvements over the next 6–9 months.
There’s also work to do on our proposal review processes. If proposal numbers keep growing faster than the number of voters, it could make the system vulnerable to exploitation. A possible solution is a gated process where only the strongest proposals make it to the voting stage. We’ll continue experimenting with this and other ideas in the next funding rounds.
Looking Ahead
If all these efforts succeed, Deep Funding will grow significantly. But growth in itself isn’t the goal—what really matters is improving the quality of proposals, fostering meaningful collaborations, and ultimately contributing to a beneficial singularity that serves all living beings and the world around us.
As we move forward, we’ll keep refining, experimenting, and adapting. At some point, we might consolidate and focus on the most effective initiatives. But for now, the foundation we’ve built over the last three years gives us the confidence to expand in multiple directions.
If you’re a developer, an idea person, a community expert, or just curious about what we’re building, there’s a place for you here. (Find current openings here) Let’s see how far we can go in the next three years!
