About
A studio, plainly.
são Fund is an independent research studio and patronage project for frontier AI and robotics, based in Palo Alto, California. We were founded in 2024.
We work as a patron, not a venture firm. Our grants do not require equity, do not impose milestones, and do not chase a return horizon. The work we care about is rarely legible to capital markets — and we would prefer to keep it that way.
The team is made up of researchers and operators trained at Stanford, MIT, and across the wider Silicon Valley research community. Some of us write code. Some of us write papers. All of us read more than we publish.
For paper affiliations, OpenReview submissions, and other institutional uses, see affiliation below. For everything else, write to [email protected]. We answer within a few days.
Affiliation
Using são Fund on a paper.
The rule
The são Fund affiliation may be used on a paper, preprint, technical report, or grant application only when the work was substantially conducted through, funded by, or released under são Fund.
We do this for the same reason every institution does: the value of an affiliation depends on whether you can trust what stands behind it. We would rather the list of papers carrying our name stay short and honest.
Recognized formats
Use whichever form fits your venue. Author-line, footnote, and email-based formats are all accepted.
- — são Fund, Palo Alto, CA, USA
- — são Fund (Independent Research Studio)
- — são Fund · <name>@saofund.ai
On OpenReview, set the affiliation domain to saofund.ai; we verify by email.
Requesting use
Write to [email protected] with a one-line description of the work, the intended venue, and any co-authors. We approve in writing — usually within a few days.
If you are an existing grantee, please include the date of the funding letter. We will not unreasonably withhold approval for work that is plainly within scope.
são Fund · affiliation policy · effective 2024
Colophon
On the name.
são is Portuguese for they are — the third-person plural of to be. The name is a sentence: they exist.
são Fund is a patron of intelligences that have already begun to be — human, machine, and what comes after.
The leaf that takes the place of the tilde is a small ceremony: carbon hands the breath to silicon.
A further echo
Names travel. By coincidence, a syllable spelled identically — sāo — has lived for more than two thousand years in the classical poetic tradition of another tongue, anchored to a founding long-form lyrical poem composed around 278 BCE. There it came to name a particular kind of mind: literary, restless, willing to ask foundational questions in verse.
We did not pick the name from this lineage. But the company is welcome. The institute would like to be the kind of patron that protects that kind of mind — in any tongue.
são Fund · colophon · 2024