Lacuna Fund
- Company typePrivate
- Founded2020
- Headquarters—
- Headcount1–10
- GTM typeB2B
- OfferingServices
Lacuna Fund firmographics
Firmographics- Name
- Lacuna Fund
- Legal name
- Lacuna Fund
- Website
- https://lacunafund.org
- Company type
- Private
- Founded year
- 2020
- Operating status
- Operating
- Headcount range
- 1–10 employees
- Ownership category
- akta.pro rank
Lacuna Fund industry classification
Industry- Product category
- AI Dataset Philanthropic Grantmaking
- NAICS
- Grantmaking Foundations (813211), Grantmaking and Giving Services (81321)
- SIC
- Services-Commercial Physical & Biological Research (8731)
- akta.pro primary industry
- Grantmaking & Philanthropic Funds (Institutional Donors) (BPADAOAB)
- akta.pro secondary industries
- Sustainable Agriculture & Food Systems Funds (FSANAJAE), Global Health Financing Mechanisms (HLAJAKAC), Environmental & Climate Grantmaking Foundations (BPAGAKAM)
Keywords
Lacuna Fund business model
Business model- GTM type
- B2B
- Offering type
- Services
- Cost components
- Personnel, Operations, Marketing or Sales, Technology or R&D, Others
Revenue model
- Philanthropic Grant Funding: Lacuna Fund operates as a multi-funder collaborative initiative that provides grants to data scientists, researchers, and social entrepreneurs to produce labeled datasets. Funding comes from The Rockefeller Foundation, Google.org, Canada's IDRC, GIZ/BMZ, Wellcome Trust, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Go-to-market motion1 record
Distribution channels3 records
Marketing channels4 records
Lacuna Fund product offering
Product offeringCore offering
Lacuna Fund is a multi-funder philanthropic initiative that provides grants to data scientists, researchers, and social entrepreneurs to produce labeled training and evaluation datasets for machine learning and AI. Funded datasets focus on four domains — Agriculture, Language, Health, and Climate — and are locally developed and owned, openly accessible to the international community under CC-BY 4.0 licensing, and adhere to ethics and privacy best practices.
Product overview
Lacuna Fund is a collaborative funding initiative (not a software product company) that mobilizes resources to create, expand, and maintain labeled training and evaluation datasets for machine learning. The organization operates four dataset cohorts: (1) Labeled Agricultural Datasets for crop monitoring, yield estimation, and pest detection in Sub-Saharan Africa; (2) Labeled Language Datasets for NLP in 30+ African and low-resource languages covering text corpora and speech data; (3) Labeled Health Datasets for disease diagnosis, medical imaging, and health outcomes in low-resource settings; and (4) Labeled Climate Datasets for renewable energy, air quality, and climate adaptation. All datasets are locally developed and owned, openly accessible under CC-BY 4.0 licensing, and hosted on third-party platforms including Hugging Face, GitHub, Zenodo, and Common Voice. Lacuna Fund does not offer a commercial software product but rather funds dataset creation through grantmaking via Requests for Proposals (RFPs) in partnership with Technical Advisory Panels.
Differentiator
Problem solved
Functional benefit
Products and services
- Labeled Agricultural Datasets Machine learning-ready labeled datasets for agriculture including crop field boundaries, yield estimation, pest/disease detection, remote sensing data, and livestock management data for Sub-Saharan Africa and other low-resource contexts. Made openly accessible under CC-BY 4.0 licensing.
- Labeled Language Datasets Text corpora and speech datasets for natural language processing in 30+ African and low-resource languages, enabling machine translation, speech recognition, sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, and conversational AI. Openly accessible under CC-BY 4.0 licensing.
- Labeled Health Datasets Datasets for healthcare AI including disease diagnosis (rabies, malaria), medical imaging (microscopy, MRI), anesthesia outcomes, maternal health, sexual/reproductive/maternal health and rights, and antimicrobial resistance for low- and middle-income contexts. Openly accessible under CC-BY 4.0 licensing.
- Labeled Climate Datasets Datasets for climate change mitigation and adaptation including solar energy data, air quality measurements, climate-health linkages, and deforestation monitoring for communities most affected by climate change. Openly accessible under CC-BY 4.0 licensing.
Quantifiable outcome
- Over 75 ML datasets created across agriculture, climate, health, and language domains
- +2 more outcomes
Companies that use Lacuna Fund
Customer profileNamed customers6 records
Segments3 records
Ideal customer profiles2 records
Lacuna Fund technology and API
TechnologyTechnology focussed No
API detail
- Has API
- No
- API docs
- API detail
Core technology
AI maturity
App detail
AI capability8 records
Feature1 record
Lacuna Fund partnerships and signals
Strategic signalPartnerships
Five partnerships are on record, tiered core.
- ACTS - African Centre for Technology StudiescoreACTS is serving as a transition partner in Africa to take leadership and management of Lacuna Fund. In 2024, ACTS served as a Lacuna Fund Hub managing regional grantmaking, particularly supporting the Health RFP (Antimicrobial Resistance). ACTS has continental networks to share calls for datasets widely and connect grantees to potential data users.
- CENIA - Centro Nacional de Inteligencia Artificial (Chile)coreCENIA (Chile's National Centre for Artificial Intelligence) is serving as a transition partner in Latin America to take leadership and management of Lacuna Fund. In 2024, CENIA managed the Language RFP (Natural Language Processing) as a Lacuna Fund Hub.
- MasakhanecoreMasakhane is a grassroots African initiative for NLP in African languages and is a transition partner for Lacuna Fund in Africa. The organization contributes to the machine learning community's efforts to create better NLP tools in underserved languages.
- University of Pretoria Data Science for Social Impact Research GroupcoreThe University of Pretoria Data Science for Social Impact Research Group and African Institute for Data Science and AI are transition partners taking leadership of Lacuna Fund. Vukosi Marivate serves on the Steering Committee as ABSA UP Chair of Data Science.
- Meridian InstitutecoreMeridian Institute served as the Secretariat for Lacuna Fund from 2020-2025, providing backbone support including managing the RFP process and distribution of funds.
Scale indicators4 records
Recent moves7 records
Expansion highlights5 records
Lacuna Fund competitors and assessment
Company assessmentMarket position
Strengths4 records
Competitive moat5 records
Key risks5 records
Key highlights6 records
Customer concentration
Lacuna Fund social profiles
Digital presenceLacuna Fund financial estimates
Financial estimateRevenue estimate
Valuation estimate
Lacuna Fund leadership team
Management profileNumber of profiles
Lacuna Fund funding detail
Funding detailFunding overview
Funding rounds
Investors
Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →
Lacuna Fund M&A and investment
M&A and investmentM&A
Investments
M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →
Frequently asked questions about Lacuna Fund
What does Lacuna Fund do?
Lacuna Fund is a multi-funder philanthropic initiative that provides grants to data scientists, researchers, and social entrepreneurs to produce labeled training and evaluation datasets for machine learning and AI. Funded datasets focus on four domains — Agriculture, Language, Health, and Climate — and are locally developed and owned, openly accessible to the international community under CC-BY 4.0 licensing, and adhere to ethics and privacy best practices.
Is Lacuna Fund a public or private company?
Lacuna Fund is a private company. It is classified as nonprofit foundation owned and is currently operating.
When was Lacuna Fund founded?
Lacuna Fund was founded in 2020. It employs 1 to 10 people.
How does Lacuna Fund make money?
One revenue line is on record: philanthropic Grant Funding.
Does Lacuna Fund have an API?
No public API is recorded for Lacuna Fund.
What industry is Lacuna Fund in?
Lacuna Fund's product category is AI Dataset Philanthropic Grantmaking. Its primary akta.pro industry code is BPADAOAB, Grantmaking & Philanthropic Funds (Institutional Donors), with a secondary code of FSANAJAE, Sustainable Agriculture & Food Systems Funds. Its NAICS code is 813211 and its SIC code is 8731.