What Code for Science & Society does

Code for Science & Society (CS&S) is a US-registered 501(c)(3) public charity founded in 2017 and headquartered in Portland, Oregon, operating with a small team of 1-10 employees. The organization's single core offering is a Fiscal Sponsorship Program through which it provides financial administration, operational support, and strategic expertise to data-focused projects — particularly those working in research data management, open science, and scholarly communication — that lack independent tax-exempt status.

The Fiscal Sponsorship Program is the core product: it enables unincorporated projects to receive tax-deductible donations and grants under CS&S's charitable umbrella, with CS&S handling back-office functions including fund accounting, grant compliance, and donor reporting. Recent operational investment has been directed at financial infrastructure improvements explicitly aimed at increasing transparency for sponsored projects and donors. The publicly visible portfolio at the time of analysis includes FAIR Station, a research-data project onboarded in February 2026.

The business model is nonprofit: CS&S retains a fee on pass-through contributions to sponsored projects and receives direct charitable donations and grants. There are no disclosed revenue figures, funding rounds, institutional donors, or partnerships in the available data. The organization distributes no commercial product, holds no patents, and reports no awards. Its stakeholder base comprises the sponsored projects themselves (which depend on CS&S for compliance and financial infrastructure), the grantmakers and individual donors funding those projects, and the broader open-science and research-data communities it serves.

Name

Code for Science & Society

Legal name

Code for Science and Society

Website

https://codeforscience.org

Company type

Private

Founded year

2017

Operating status

Operating

Headcount range

1–10 employees

Short description

Code for Science & Society is a US-registered 501(c)(3) public charity that provides fiscal sponsorship, financial administration, and operational support to data-focused open-science and research projects unable to incorporate independently.

Ownership category

akta.pro rank

Product category

Nonprofit Fiscal Sponsorship Services

NAICS

Grantmaking and Giving Services (81321), Religious, Grantmaking, Civic, Professional, and Similar Organizations (813)

SIC

Services-Engineering, Accounting, Research, Management (8700)

akta.pro primary industry

Corporate Foundations & CSR Grantmaking (BPAGAKAC)

Keywords

• Fiscal sponsorship services
• Nonprofit financial infrastructure
• Open science support
• Research data management
• Charity operational support

Headquarters

HQ city

Portland

HQ country

United States

HQ region

North America

Markets served

GTM type

B2B

Offering type

Services

Cost components

Personnel, Operations, Technology or R&D

Revenue model

1. Fiscal Sponsorship Services: As a registered US public charity, Code for Science & Society generates revenue through fiscal sponsorship fees and likely charitable donations/grants. The organization provides financial infrastructure, transparency tools, and operational support to fiscally sponsored projects.

Go-to-market motion1 record

Distribution channels1 record

Marketing channels3 records

Core offering

Code for Science & Society operates a Fiscal Sponsorship Program through which it provides financial, operational, and strategic infrastructure support to partner nonprofit projects. As a registered US public charity, CS&S allows qualifying projects to operate under its tax-exempt umbrella while it handles administration, compliance, and reporting. The organization is specifically focused on enabling data-driven nonprofit and research-data initiatives to advance the social and economic use of data.

Product overview

Code for Science & Society operates as a US public charity that provides fiscal sponsorship services rather than a traditional software product company. The organization offers a single core offering: the Fiscal Sponsorship Program, which provides financial, operational, and strategic infrastructure support to partner projects. Recent news items reference initiatives like FAIR Station (field station reservation optimization) and Real-Time Financial Data for Projects, though these appear to be fiscally-sponsored projects rather than CS&S's own product offerings.

Differentiator

Problem solved

Functional benefit

Products and services

• Fiscal Sponsorship Program

Segments1 record

Ideal customer profiles1 record

Technology focussed No

API detail

Has API

No

API docs

API detail

Core technology

AI maturity

App detail

Scale indicators1 record

Recent moves3 records

Expansion highlights3 records

Direct peers

• Open Source Collective: Open Source Collective is a 501(c)(3) fiscal sponsor specifically for open-source projects, operating under the Open Collective umbrella. It is the most direct peer to CS&S, matching the same model of providing financial and administrative infrastructure to data/code-focused mission projects.
• NumFOCUS: NumFOCUS is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that provides fiscal sponsorship and infrastructure for open-source scientific computing projects (e.g., NumPy, pandas, Jupyter). It is a direct peer: same fiscal sponsorship model with the same target community of open-data and data-science projects.
• Software Freedom Conservancy: Software Freedom Conservancy provides fiscal sponsorship and legal services to free and open-source software projects. As a 501(c)(3) serving the open-source community, it overlaps with CS&S on the model (fiscal sponsorship) and overlaps partially on the audience (FOSS/data projects).
• Open Collective (parent platform): Open Collective operates the platform that powers Open Source Collective's fiscal sponsorship, providing transparent financial tracking for collectives, projects, and nonprofits. It is a direct peer comparable in mission and tooling-driven approach to transparent, community-led fiscal hosting.

Emerging players

• Center for Open Science: The Center for Open Science (COS) is a nonprofit advancing openness, integrity, and reproducibility of research, including platforms like OSF. It is an emerging player operating in the same open-science mission space CS&S serves, though it delivers infrastructure products directly rather than acting as a fiscal sponsor.

Broad incumbents

• Mozilla Foundation: Mozilla Foundation is a large nonprofit that funds and supports open-source and open-web initiatives. It is a broad incumbent in the open-source/data grantmaking space, with substantially greater resources than CS&S but a similar mission-aligned funding approach.
• Apache Software Foundation: The Apache Software Foundation is an established 501(c)(3) providing governance, legal, and financial infrastructure for open-source projects. It is a broad incumbent operating with the same fiscal-sponsorship-like model at much greater scale within the FOSS community.
• The Linux Foundation: The Linux Foundation provides financial and legal infrastructure to thousands of open-source projects, with a much broader portfolio and resources than CS&S. It is a broad incumbent in the same fiscal-sponsorship-for-open-source space.

Others

• Internet Archive: The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit building a digital library of cultural artifacts and supporting open data access. It is thematically related to CS&S's open-data mission and serves as an example of a US-based open-data nonprofit, though it operates its own services rather than acting as a fiscal sponsor.
• Alfred P. Sloan Foundation: The Sloan Foundation is a major US private foundation that funds scientific research and data-driven scholarship, including open-science initiatives. It is adjacent rather than directly comparable; CS&S operates as the fiscal vehicle for projects that funds like Sloan ultimately support.

Market position

Strengths5 records

Weaknesses5 records

Competitive moat4 records

Key risks5 records

Key highlights6 records

Customer concentration

• GitHubgithub.com/codeforscience
• LinkedInlinkedin.com/company/code-for-science-society

Revenue estimate

Valuation estimate

Number of profiles

Profiles4 records

Funding overview

Funding rounds2 records

Investors1 record

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M&A

Investments

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Frequently asked questions about Code for Science & Society