Open Athena is a nonprofit that accelerates academia with capabilities from the AI frontier
AI is transforming how discovery happens, but the ability to build and adapt large foundation models is concentrated inside industry.
Open Athena provides labs with engineers, compute, and coordination to transform promising prototypes into breakthrough foundation models that are developed openly and sustained within academic systems.
PROJECTS
Here's a selection of our current projects
MARIN
Open development large language models
With Stanford, Open Athena is building a fully open platform for research and development of foundation models.
PLANTCAD + GENECAD
DNA foundation model for plant genomics
In partnership with Cornell, PlantCAD teaches AI to read plant DNA, while GeneCAD identifies the genes responsible for shaping growth, yield, and resilience.
BOLTZGEN
Target-specific protein generation model
Developed with MIT, BoltzGen is a generative model that designs proteins that bind to user-specified target molecules.
TESTIMONIALS
"Our collaboration with Open Athena has been a game-changer for our development of AI models of the ocean and climate. Jesse and Alex engage with our entire team—from MSc interns to senior faculty—with the same high level of professionalism. Beyond their outstanding technical chops, they express genuine scientific curiosity, helping us rethink our hypotheses and explore new ideas. It has been a truly exceptional partnership."
"Working with Open Athena has been one of the most invigorating collaborative experiences of my career—it is not an exaggeration to say that it has been transformative for my research program. The team at Open Athena is exceptionally talented and creative; it is so much fun to think through challenging problems with them. And perhaps just as importantly, the Open Athena team have been tremendous mentors to the early career researchers in our group, pushing them to do top-tier work, while giving them the space to grow as scientists."
"Open Athena, with its world class researchers and engineers, has been instrumental in propelling Marin towards its mission of developing foundation models openly."
OUR MODEL
Build together.
Share openly.
Advance science.
For Labs:
- We provide engineering talent, compute resources, and project coordination.
- You bring the scientific expertise, the questions, and the data.
- Together we build models that grow into shared scientific infrastructure.
For Engineers:
- Work on frontier problems with real scientific impact.
- Contribute to development in the open: code, models, and tools.
- Join hubs in New York, London, San Francisco, and Boston.
