You're pledging to donate if the project hits its minimum goal and gets approved. If not, your funds will be returned.
Exea Labs (legally Future Leaders Initiative, 501(c)(3), EIN 33-2434043) is a free, youth-led AI/STEM research collective. Since founding in April 2026, we've grown to 600+ student researchers across 25 countries, giving them free access to compute, API credits, and mentorship (currently $125,000+ in-kind, from AMD compute credits to cloud/API partnerships) with no cost and no gatekeeping. We're asking Manifund donors to help fund Catalyst, our first in-person research summit, and the basic operating costs (hosting, software, outreach) we currently cover personally as founders.
Our goal is to bring Exea's online research community together in person for the first time via Catalyst, a spring 2027 research summit in the Bay Area and New York. We achieve this by pairing free compute/mentorship access online year-round with a capstone in-person event where researchers present work, meet mentors, and build a real peer network. We also want to expand our AI-safety-adjacent research tracks (interpretability, evals literacy) for members who want to go deeper than general ML.
Confirmed venue/logistics costs for Catalyst run $700-1,000 per city (two cities). Beyond that, funding covers organizational overhead we're currently paying for personally as founders: hosting, software subscriptions (compute/API dashboards, outreach tools), and printed/digital materials for the summit. We have never held a cash budget before; our current cash budget is $0, and all prior support has been in-kind (compute credits, API access) from partners.
I'm Avneh Bhatia (16, co-founder), based in Pleasanton, CA, running Exea's marketing, partnerships, and day-to-day operations alongside school. My co-founder Joshua Selvaraj (18) is our IRS-listed Principal Officer and handles the other half of operations. Track record: we grew Exea from zero to 600+ researchers in 25 countries in about 5 months, entirely through in-kind partnerships (including a negotiated AMD cloud-compute-credit deal) and volunteer effort, with two published member research results (FoilCORE, MicroVLA) already out.
The most likely failure mode is simply not raising enough to cover Catalyst logistics, in which case we'd scale the event down to a single city or delay it, since it's new programming layered on top of Exea's existing free online model, not something the core program depends on. There's no risk to Exea's existing 600+ member community either way, since that runs on in-kind compute/mentorship partnerships independent of this ask.
We have not raised any cash funding in the last 12 months. Our support to date has been entirely in-kind: compute/cloud credits and API access from partners (~$125,000+ estimated value), no cash grants received. We have pending applications with several other foundations (Hansen Family Foundation, Coefficient Giving, Synopsys Outreach Foundation) but no cash has been awarded yet.