Who are we

We find and fund elite developers working on side projects that are so complex that AIs/agents fail to help them code.

Yep, that's us. But how did we come to this?

2023 - 2025: Become the "Open Source home"

We started in 2023 by building a platform to contribute to open source.

Over the years, we’ve worked to:

• Make it easy for any maintainer to get visibility, contributors, and actual help

• Make it easy for any contributor to find a project and a good first issue (without reading 14 outdated READMEs)

• Provide a "matching engine" where contributors are recommended projects based on their skills and interests.

• Show metrics for maintainers: who’s looking at your project, who applied, and how experienced they are.

2025 - now:

We spent years mastering something most companies never crack: finding elite developers and funding their best work.

By 2024, we'd distributed $15M to 400 open source projects, building an expertise in what makes truly exceptional code, and how to fund it without micromanagement.

Then we moved to San Francisco, and the top AI labs pulled us aside with a problem:

They confessed a hard reality: their coding agents were acing toy benchmarks but failing catastrophically on real-world systems, on the kind of intricate, closed-source, deeply contextual code that OnlyDust’s network lived for.

That’s when it clicked.

We reoriented everything toward a new mission: funding engineers whose code breaks AI.

Today, OnlyDust (operating under our Ctrl+G brand for AI labs) partners with the world’s top research teams to turn elite, private codebases into the most rigorous coding benchmarks ever built.

We no longer just fund open source. We fund the impossible, so machines can one day catch up to human ingenuity.