Laude Institute

Laude Institute helps computer science researchers turn ideas into usable technology through grants and hands-on support. It operates as a nonprofit with a public benefit corporation operating arm, supporting open publication, open source, and open discourse. Slingshots provides fast grants and practical help for early-stage research, including compute, product strategy, and infrastructure. Moonshots supports longer-term research labs addressing problems such as scientific discovery, healthcare, and workforce reskilling.

Launched in 2025, Laude was co-founded by Andy Konwinski, Chris Rytting, Justin Fiedler, K. Tighe, and Lindsey Gregory; Dave Patterson chairs its board. Its research contributions include Terminal-Bench, developed with Stanford researchers to evaluate AI agents using terminals for computer tasks beyond coding. Harbor extends this work into infrastructure that lets developers define tasks and run evaluations across multiple benchmarks, helping teams measure whether changes to their agents improve performance.

Konwinski committed $100 million to establish Laude in 2025, alongside additional support from other technologists. In 2026, Laude announced 13 projects in its third Slingshots cohort, covering local inference, model architectures, continual learning, agentic systems, and biological sciences. By March 2026, Harbor’s co-creator reported that the framework had adapted dozens of benchmarks, extending its coverage beyond a single evaluation suite.