About This Demo
This demo shows what becomes possible when you harmonize funding data across organizations into a shared, versioned registry.
The Idea
Research funders make decisions in relative isolation. A program officer at the Gates Foundation may not know that the Wellcome Trust just funded the same institution for related work. An NIH reviewer can't easily see how their agency's portfolio overlaps with UK research councils.
By "underlaying" grant data — structuring it into a common schema and publishing it to an open, versioned registry — we can answer questions that were previously impossible:
- Who else funds what I fund? See which funders share your recipients.
- Who is like me? Compare portfolios by topic, geography, and recipient overlap.
- Where are the gaps? Find research areas funded by one funder but not others.
Data Sources
| Source | Grants | Total | License |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation | 7,086 | $2.2B | Public CSV |
| Wellcome Trust | 5,000 | $9.9B | CC-BY 4.0 |
| Nuffield Foundation | 538 | $160.3M | CC-BY 4.0 |
| Wolfson Foundation | 4,254 | $514.4M | CC-BY 4.0 |
| Gatsby Charitable Foundation | 227 | $491.0M | CC-BY 4.0 |
| National Institutes of Health | 5,603 | $3.5B | Public domain |
How It Works
Scrape — Each source has a dedicated scraper that fetches grants from public APIs, CSVs, or standards like 360Giving.
Harmonize — Grants from different sources are transformed into a common schema with normalized institution names for cross-source matching.
Publish — The unified dataset is pushed to Underlay, where it gets a version number, content hash, and permanent identifier.
Explore — This site reads from the published collection. Every chart has a "View Source" equivalent in the Data tab.
What is Underlay?
Underlay is a decentralized registry for structured knowledge. Think of it as version control for datasets: every collection is immutable, content-addressed, and independently verifiable. Data is decoupled from any single application — the same collection can power different UIs, analyses, and integrations.
This demo contains 22,708 grants totaling $16.6B from 6 funders across 120 countries, with 219 recipients funded by multiple sources.
If you're solving a global problem, you want this for the world.
Browse the collection at underlay.org or learn more about the Underlay project.