Research infrastructure · Science funding
Experiment
A crowdfunding site where a graduate student can raise three thousand dollars in a month instead of waiting a year for a grant. Founded in Seattle in 2012 as Microryza, it has funded 1,433 projects, and 126 papers indexed in Europe PMC name it in their funding acknowledgments.
The five thousand dollars that did not exist
Cindy Wu was 22 and had worked on an enzyme designed to help the human immune system recognise anthrax. She wanted to try the same approach on staph bacteria. The supplies would cost $5,000.
She asked her professor at the University of Washington how to get it. His answer, as she recounted it to NextShark in 2015: “You can’t, because you are 22 years old and you don’t have a Ph.D. and you don’t want more than $25,000.”
Both halves of that sentence describe a structure, not a person. The sum was too small for a grant cycle and she was too junior to start one. Wu and a fellow student, Denny Luan, taught themselves to code and put a site online in April 2012.
Why small science is hard to fund
The squeeze is measurable. A 2019 study of the platform in PLOS ONE noted that the National Science Foundation funded 23 percent of competitive grant applications in 2014 and the National Institutes of Health funded 16 percent of new research applications in 2015. Wu put it more bluntly to VentureBeat in 2014: “NIH used to fund 30% of projects, and now they are only funding 10-15% of proposals, and the number of proposals has doubled.”
There is a second cost. Money awarded to a university carries indirect cost recovery, which the company puts at 50 to 60 percent of a typical grant. Experiment routes funds as a gift with no overhead applied, so a $3,000 campaign buys roughly $3,000 of reagents.
The model is all or nothing, borrowed from Kickstarter. A campaign runs 30 to 45 days against a target. Miss it and nobody is charged. Hit it and the platform keeps 8 percent plus processing. Staff review every proposal.
Two biologists and a bad name
Wu was funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute as an undergraduate and was on the University of Washington team that won the 2011 iGEM world championship. She left graduate school to build the company. Seattle investors passed. Y Combinator took them into the Winter 2013 batch.
On Demo Day the three minute pitch raised $1.2 million. It also produced the endorsement the company has quoted ever since. Reporting from that day, TechCrunch recorded the line as: “This solution helps close the gap for potentially promising but unfunded projects.” The speaker was Bill Gates.
The name was the problem. Microryza played on mycorrhiza, the symbiotic root fungus, and almost nobody could say it. At a party someone told Wu they loved Micro-Zynga. Luan drew up 500 candidate words, nearly bought Cofactor.com, settled for Ryza.com at $7,500, then could not bring himself to build it. As he told Priceonomics: “In 40 years, when I told my grandkids what I did, I shuddered at the idea of telling them I worked at a company called ‘Ryza’.” On a whim he emailed the owner of Experiment.com, a physics graduate who had held the domain since 1996 waiting for someone worthy. They agreed on $54,000 in cash. The rebrand went live in February 2014.
The pivot nobody announced
After 2016 the business quietly acquired a second shape. Alongside the open feed, Experiment began running managed grant programs for outside funders: a foundation puts up a pot, scientists apply through the same open proposal format, reviewers comment in public, and the crowd can top up the winners. A separate 501(c)(3), the Experiment Foundation, handles the philanthropic side.
The flagship was the FootPrint Coalition Science Engine, launched with Robert Downey Jr.’s climate outfit in 2022 across seven categories and 40 projects in year one. Homeworld Collective ran its $1.35 million Garden Grants round here in 2024, going from open call to decisions in ten weeks across 65 applications. Its write up says plainly: “We couldn’t have done this without the Experiment.com team.” More than seventy challenge grants are listed since 2016.
What is proven, and what is still claimed
| Evidence | What the record shows | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| Papers acknowledging it | Europe PMC, Sep 24, 2026: 126 records whose funding acknowledgment names Experiment.com, 181 mentioning it anywhere in full text, 8 mentioning Microryza. | Public record |
| The company’s own count | The live how it works page states: “There have been 20 published papers in scientific journals through funded experiments!” That is about a sixth of the indexed total. The understatement runs against the company, not for it. | Differs from the record |
| Independent study | PLOS ONE, Jan 2019. Sauermann, Franzoni and Shafi coded all 725 campaigns from May 2012 to August 2015, covering 1,148 creators. Success rate 48 percent against 36 percent on Kickstarter. Median raised $3,105, mean $12,652, skewed by one $2.6M outlier. | Public record |
| Who the crowd funds | Same study: students below doctoral level succeeded at 61 percent, associate and full professors at 33 percent. Women at 57 percent, men at 43 percent. Listing prior publications had no significant relationship with success. | Public record |
| Platform totals | Sep 2026 start page: $12,718,617 pledged, 1,433 funded projects, average project $3,372, 48.03 percent success rate, 40,000 individual backers. | Company-stated |
| The YC listing | Still live, it says 47,000 citizens pledged $9 million to 900 projects at a 46 percent success rate. The company’s own pages now say $12.7 million and 1,433 projects. | Stale versus company pages |
| Nonprofit arm | Experiment Foundation, EIN 99-0758904, Berkeley, California. FY2024 Form 990 filed May 13, 2025: contributions $479,840, investment income $6, wages $5,207, assets $470,435, liabilities zero. Officers David Lang, Rachel Kropa and Paul Keolu Fox, all unpaid. | Public record |
| Foundation claims | Its site reports more than 300 projects funded, more than $2.2 million granted, and 187 percent year over year growth in follow on crowdfunding in 2024. Only one year of Form 990 data is digitised, so the totals cannot be checked. | Company-stated |
| The 2022 award | Falling Walls gave Breakthrough of the Year in Science and Innovation Management to Robert Downey Jr. and Rachel Kropa for the FootPrint Coalition Science Engine. The Foundation describes it as won through its partnership. The citation names the funder, not the platform. | Independent |
| Institutional view | The University of Waterloo research office lists Experiment as an ongoing route: 8 percent commission, an expected average of $5,000 as an unrestricted grant, no IP constraints, success rate approximately 40 percent. | Independent |
Read plainly: few science funding experiments of the last fifteen years carry an auditable output trail like this one. The papers exist, they are indexed, and an outside team was allowed to code the whole campaign history and publish what it found. What is not visible is the business. The platform has moved about $12.7 million in fourteen years, roughly a million dollars of cumulative fees at an 8 percent take, and the grant program work is priced privately.
What to watch
- Whether the acknowledgment count keeps climbing. It is the only output metric neither the company nor its funders control.
- Whether managed grant programs become the main business. Range Media Partners, the California Institute for Biodiversity and the Wildlife Disease Association all run funds here.
- The FY2025 Form 990, which would show whether the $479,840 contribution year was a floor or a peak.
- An internal contradiction: the FAQ says funds can reach accounts in four countries, while the start page says only United States researchers can be supported.
- Who runs the for profit now. Both founders moved to a new venture, Jelly, and no current chief executive appears in any public record found.
In their words
“You can’t, because you are 22 years old and you don’t have a Ph.D. and you don’t want more than $25,000.”
Cindy Wu’s professor, as recounted by Wu, NextShark, 2015 · Independent
“We are bringing science funding back to how it used to be”
Cindy Wu, co-founder, VentureBeat, February 2014 · Independent
“This solution helps close the gap for potentially promising but unfunded projects.”
Bill Gates, quoted in TechCrunch coverage of YC Demo Day, March 2013 · Independent
“In 40 years, when I told my grandkids what I did, I shuddered at the idea of telling them I worked at a company called ‘Ryza’.”
Denny Luan, co-founder, on the near rebrand, Priceonomics, 2014 · Independent
“In less than a couple of months, you can go from a question or hypothesis to money in your hand for experiments”
Matthew Bochman, molecular biologist, Indiana University Bloomington, Nature Index · Independent
“The experiment foundation funding resulted in preliminary data that I used in my NSF CAREER grant that was funded ($600,000.00).”
Rosalyn Abbott, Carnegie Mellon University, testimonial on the company site · Company-published
“But the amounts currently raised through crowdfunding are small, and so crowdfunding can only complement the funding of most traditional research projects.”
Henry Sauermann, co-author of the PLOS ONE study, CEPR, 2019 · Peer-reviewed author
Related companies
Sources
- Public recordEurope PMC acknowledgment and full text search
- Public recordCrowdfunding scientific research: descriptive insights and correlates of funding success
- Public recordIRS Form 990, Experiment Foundation, EIN 99-0758904, FY2024
- Public recordForm D, Experiment I Fund, a series of Wefunds LLC
- Public recordEDGAR company search for filers named Experiment
- IndependentCrowdfunding money for research levels the playing field
- IndependentFalling Walls announces Science Breakthroughs of the Year 2022
- IndependentExperiment.com is pushing science forward with crowdfunding
- IndependentY Combinator Winter 2013 Demo Day, Batch 1
- IndependentHow Microryza acquired the domain Experiment.com
- IndependentStartup founder raises $1.2 million in minutes
- IndependentHere’s how to crowdfund your research
- IndependentResearch office programme listing for Experiment.com
- PartnerAnnouncing the Garden Grants winners
- PartnerScience Engine 2022 end of year report
- CompanyStart, FAQ, how it works, grants and funders pages
- CompanyAbout and home pages
- CompanyExperiment company listing
Profile researched and written by Healthcare Discovery. Last updated September 29, 2026.
