Primer

Fast Grants: Small, Rapid, Light-Touch Research Funding

David Hilmer Rex · July 2026

Summary

A fast grant is a small research grant awarded quickly, on a light application, with a decision in days to a few weeks, minimal reporting, and often a discretionary rather than a committee-based selection. The model was crystallised by Fast Grants during the COVID-19 pandemic, which funded scientists within days when conventional funding moved in months, and it descends from Emergent Ventures and a broader movement toward fast and flexible research funding. The most striking finding from the experiment was not about speed but about rigidity: when surveyed, most Fast Grants recipients said they would change their research substantially if their existing funding could be spent freely. This primer covers what fast grants are, where they came from, the evidence, their design, their limits, and the recent wave, including in the UK.

The idea ↑

A fast grant combines four features. It is small, typically enough to unblock a specific piece of work rather than to fund a whole programme. It is fast, with a decision in days or a couple of weeks rather than the six to twelve months typical of public funding. It is light, requiring a short application and little reporting. And it is often discretionary, decided by one person or a small trusted group rather than a large committee running a formal peer-review process.

The point of the combination is to reach work that the standard system serves badly: the timely, the exploratory, the small, and the unconventional. When speed matters, or when the amount needed is too small to justify a full proposal, the transaction cost of conventional funding can exceed the grant itself. Fast grants collapse that cost.

Origins ↑

The immediate ancestor is Emergent Ventures, launched in 2018 at the Mercatus Center and led by the economist Tyler Cowen, which makes small, fast grants and fellowships to individuals with unconventional ideas and little patience for long application processes.¹

The model became widely known through Fast Grants, set up in April 2020 by Tyler Cowen, Patrick Collison, and Patrick Hsu as an emergency response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Conventional grant funding moved far too slowly for a fast-moving crisis, so Fast Grants offered decisions in as little as forty-eight hours and distributed roughly fifty million dollars to several hundred research projects, funded by a group of philanthropists and technology founders.² The application was a few questions; the review was rapid and discretionary; the money moved in days. It supported a wide range of early pandemic work at a moment when the normal system could not act in time.

The problem it solves ↑

Fast grants respond to several failures of conventional project funding at once. Speed: in an emergency, or in a fast-moving field, a six-to-twelve-month decision cycle can arrive after the moment for the work has passed. Transaction cost: for a small amount of money, the effort of writing and reviewing a full proposal can dwarf the grant. Coverage: exploratory pilots, unconventional ideas, and researchers without the profile to win a large competitive grant fall through the gaps of a system built around big, slow, formal awards. Flexibility: an unrestricted small grant lets a researcher follow a lead immediately, without waiting for the next call or fitting the idea to an existing programme.

The most quoted result from Fast Grants speaks to this last point. When recipients were surveyed, around a third said the funded work would not have happened without the grant, and a large majority said they would change the direction of their research substantially if they could spend their existing funding freely.² The finding is less about speed than about how tightly conventional grants constrain what researchers are allowed to do with money they already hold.

Design dimensions ↑

Fast-grant schemes differ along a few axes, and the choices determine what the mechanism reaches.

• Size. Small by design. Fast grants work because they are below the threshold where a funder feels it must run heavy diligence. Push the size up and the speed and lightness tend to disappear.
• Decision speed. The defining feature. Days to a few weeks, on a rolling basis rather than fixed annual deadlines.
• Application weight. A short form rather than a long proposal. Some schemes drop the requirement for preliminary data or an institutional affiliation entirely.
• Selection mode. Discretionary decision by a trusted individual or small panel, rather than a large committee. This is what makes speed possible, and also what concentrates judgment and risk in a few people.
• Reporting. Light. Heavy reporting requirements reintroduce the transaction cost that fast grants exist to remove.
• Risk posture. An explicit willingness to fund things that might not work, and to accept that some grants will lead nowhere.

Evidence and results ↑

The evidence base is young. Fast Grants itself is the richest source, both as an existence proof that fast, discretionary funding can move serious money in days without collapsing into chaos, and through its recipient survey, which produced the widely cited findings about the rigidity of existing funding.² Emergent Ventures has a longer track record of backing individuals and early ideas, though its impact is harder to measure precisely because its bets are small and diffuse.

The most systematic treatment to date is the Research on Research Institute's review of fast and flexible research funding, which surveys the growing set of schemes, distinguishes the design choices that matter, and assesses what is and is not yet known about their effects.³ Its cautious conclusion is that speed and flexibility are real and valuable, but that the field still lacks the controlled comparisons that would let anyone say precisely how much fast grants add, and for which kinds of work.

The new wave ↑

After the pandemic, the model spread from emergency use into a standing instrument. The clearest recent example is the Centre for British Progress, which in 2026 launched a fast-grants programme for research and policy work on UK growth and progress, with decisions within two weeks, no requirement for an academic affiliation, and applications reviewed weekly on a rolling basis, explicitly applying the Fast Grants model to a new domain.⁴ A parallel current runs through public funders experimenting with faster and lighter processes, from distributed peer review that cuts assessment time to lottery-based allocation that removes committee bottlenecks.

Trade-offs and limits ↑

Discretion cuts both ways. The speed of fast grants comes from concentrating judgment in a person or a small group. That is efficient, but it also concentrates the risk of bias, favouritism, and network effects, where the people who already know the decision-makers are best placed to get funded. Formal peer review is slow partly because it is trying to be fair and legible; fast grants trade some of that for speed.

Scale. Fast grants work for small amounts. They are not a mechanism for funding large infrastructure, long programmes, or anything requiring sustained multi-year commitment. They fill a gap in the portfolio rather than replacing the slower instruments.

Accountability and evaluation. Light applications and light reporting make fast grants hard to audit and hard to evaluate counterfactually. It is difficult to know what a fast grant caused, as opposed to what would have happened anyway, which makes the mechanism demanding to justify to boards and publics that expect documented returns.

Adverse selection. A scheme that is easy to apply to attracts a lot of applications, including weak ones, and the light-touch review that makes it fast also makes it harder to filter carefully. The design has to manage the tension between openness and quality.

It is one instrument, not a system. Like people funding, fast grants are most valuable as one component of a diverse portfolio, suited to the timely, the small, and the exploratory, alongside slower instruments suited to scale and to long-horizon commitment. Their value is what they add to the mix.

Danish relevance ↑

Fast grants are a natural fit for the Danish enterprise foundations. A funder that answers to a short political cycle finds discretionary, lightly documented grants difficult to defend. A self-owning foundation with independent capital can run a fast track without asking anyone's permission, and can absorb the failures that a portfolio of small bets will inevitably include.⁵ VILLUM FONDEN's Villum Experiment, which funds bold, unconventional ideas through an anonymised review that removes the usual track-record signals, is a Danish instance of the same impulse to reach work the standard system filters out, though it is closer to a blind-review scheme than to a pure fast grant. The open question for Danish foundations is whether to add an explicit fast track: small, rapid, discretionary grants that complement their large, long, person-based instruments at the other end of the spectrum. The connection to the enterprise foundation model is again the point. Independence from the budget cycle is what makes both ends of the range possible.