What this is.

Emergent Ventures is a fast, small-dollar grant program run by Tyler Cowen at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. It funds individuals — often young, often weird, often outside the institutions that normally distribute capital — with grants typically between $5k and $50k.

Tyler announces each cohort on Marginal Revolution as a numbered blog post: "Emergent Ventures winners, 34th cohort." He writes a line or two per grantee. There are 30+ main cohorts and a parallel India track run by Shruti Rajagopalan with its own numbering.

An unofficial atlas of every grantee announced publicly. We pull names, descriptions, countries and cohort numbers from the MR announcements, classify each grantee into a category, and present the lot as a browsable, filterable archive.

Two layers:

• Base atlas: wide coverage, every grantee we could find. Sparse — many cells are unknown.
• ★ Spotlight: hand-curated deep dives on standout grantees. We track the current company, verify the project's status, and write a longer-form piece.

Status (live / dead / pivoted): Tyler doesn't track this, and no central registry does. Most grantees are marked unknown. Spotlight entries have hand-verified status.

Age at grant: rarely published. Tyler occasionally mentions when a grantee is unusually young (15, 17, 19). Otherwise null.

Category: assigned heuristically from Tyler's one-liner. A multi-disciplinary grantee may not fit cleanly. Treat categories as rough sorting, not authoritative.

Found a missing grantee? A wrong status? A great writeup we should spotlight? The data lives in two files:

• lib/data/grantees.ts — base atlas
• lib/data/spotlights.ts — curated layer

Edit either and the site updates. Back to the atlas →

This is a fan-built directory. Not affiliated with Emergent Ventures, the Mercatus Center, George Mason University, Tyler Cowen, or Shruti Rajagopalan. Apply via mercatus.org/emergent-ventures.