Rowan Brad Quni-Gudzinas
This paper presents a verified funder landscape and fit-score shortlist for sustaining QNFO, a two-year-old, solo-run, AI-assisted research platform that has produced an open corpus of approximately 1,000 method papers across seven program areas. Every funder fact was verified by live HTTP retrieval on 2026-08-13 across twenty-six pages spanning Web3 and IPFS ecosystem grantors, open-science philanthropy, and decentralized-science programs; anything not verified live is explicitly flagged. The analysis scores eleven funders on eligibility for an unaffiliated individual, topical fit with decentralized and epistemics-oriented research, and application friction, yielding a weighted ranking led by NLnet NGI Zero (calls open September 3, 2026; deadline November 3, 2026, 12:00 CEST) and Emergent Ventures, followed by the Foresight Institute, Filecoin Foundation, the Ethereum Ecosystem Support Program, Gitcoin, and the Effective Altruism funds. A sequencing calendar spans August 2026 through 2027, including the Sovereign Tech Agency Fellowship cycle. The paper documents application-readiness gaps (legal entity, residency, tax position, public identity), per-funder pitch skeletons, and framing cautions, including the risk of presenting corpus volume as rigor. It closes with an agent-executable action plan.