Announcing our new collaboration with ARIA

We are thrilled to announce a new collaboration with the Advanced Research and Intervention Agency (ARIA) to launch Focused Research Organizations (FROs) for science and technology in the UK (“FROST UK”).

What does this mean?

In spring 2025, we’ll launch an open call for FRO proposals inviting visionary scientists and engineers to propose bold ideas for FROs to accelerate ARIA’s opportunity spaces. We’ll select a cohort of proposers for our inaugural Founder in Residence (FiR) program, during which they will develop their concept. Our goal is to incubate and launch at least one FRO in the UK, based on our learnings launching 10 FROs in the US over the past 3 years.

Our FiR program is intended to pilot key design elements of our FRO creation process, including how we train scientists to found a FRO. We hope to tap into the UK’s ecosystem of scientists, innovators, and engineers to galvanize transformative mid-scale systems research projects.

Part of a network: ARIA’s activation partners

We are proud to be doing this as part of ARIA’s Activation Partners program, a network of organizations working to help architect scientific entrepreneurship in ARIA’s opportunity spaces.

We will do this by working with ARIA’s Program Directors to identify bottlenecks within their opportunity spaces that could be unblocked with large-scale public goods technologies or datasets. In many ways, this will be our first time partnering with a funding agency to evaluate gaps in their areas of focus and help “create a performer” to address them. This allows us to take advantage of natural complementarity between the ARPA mechanism and the FRO mechanism we are pioneering. The FRO that is ultimately launched will be uniquely positioned to coordinate and collaborate with others in the ARIA ecosystem.

Partnering with ARIA gives us the opportunity to work within a visionary, risk-tolerant framework, created by an organization with aligned values and an equally thoughtful approach to R&D. We’re excited to work together to grow our counterfactual impact – and expand it to the UK.

What You Can Do

Stay tuned for our launch of the official open call for FRO proposals in spring 2025.

If you’re a scientist with a big idea – either based in the UK or willing to relocate in 2026 – we encourage you to start dreaming up your FRO. For inspiration, check out our list of FROs.

About Convergent Research

Convergent Research is a non-profit science studio best known for pioneering the Focused Research Organization (FRO). We architect pivotal infrastructure that removes bottlenecks to breakthrough scientific research.

FROs are a new operating model for science that enables a high level of team science and systems engineering for public goods creation. Convergent secures funding and provides an operational backbone for counterfactual R&D, creating space for scientists to do what they do best. FRO teams are agile, creative, and risk-tolerant as a result. They make fast progress because they start and stay focused. 

We have seven successful public projects running: E11 Bio, Cultivarium, PTI, EvE Bio, Lean FRO, Forest Neurotech, and [C] Worthy. Three more are being built, and all have been instigated since 2021.

There are dozens of major bottlenecks on our list so far. If there are 20 crucial fundamental fields of science and a few bottlenecks each that can’t be solved by the existing science establishment, that’s a public goods “market size” of about 100.  Our FROs replace these bottlenecks with concrete products: tools, datasets and platforms that are accessible to the world. Our mission is to remove them all.

At Convergent we discover these bottlenecks through our roadmapping process, which focuses on recurring and stubborn impediments to paradigm-shifting work. Then we assemble and fund world-class teams uniquely committed and suited to each pursuit. We give them a low operational burden, combined with a high degree of freedom to operate.  Milestone management and governance are handled centrally. 

We work closely with colleagues in academia and venture capital, who are the ultimate users of the products we create. Our work addresses specific challenges that they are not best-suited to attack.

For more information on us and our portfolio, please visit www.convergentresearch.org