Astera Residency Program

The Astera Institute is a research and philanthropic organization founded by Jed McCaleb, co-founder of Ripple and Stellar, and is based in Emeryville, California. Astera operates as a hybrid: it runs in-house research projects, makes philanthropic grants, and runs the Residency Program described here. Astera holds a controlling stake in Voltage Park, a for-profit GPU-rental operation that McCaleb's nonprofit capitalized in late 2023 with roughly $500M of NVIDIA hardware.

The Residency Program is a one-year placement at the Emeryville campus for scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs building open-science public goods. Compensation is a salary of $125,000 to $250,000 commensurate with experience, plus a negotiated project budget of $0 to $1.5M. Compute access is on-demand against the 24,000 NVIDIA HGX H100 fleet at Voltage Park, with reserved time on B200 and GB300 hardware as it comes online. The program's binding term is Astera's Open Science Policy: all code, data, and presentations must be openly published, and Astera explicitly will not support placement in traditional journal venues.

First-cohort residents include Chongxi Lai (brain-machine interfaces, neuroscience-AI), Erika DeBenedictis (CEO of Pioneer Labs, engineering microbes for Mars), plus residents on reflective-cooling climate technology, open ice-sheet models for the Antarctic and Greenland, and fermentation-based functional foods. The second cohort, announced in late 2025, includes Aaron Tohuvavohu working on the next generation of space telescopes.

The combination of frontier-scale compute access, multi-year individual budgets in the seven-figure range, and a binding open-publication requirement is unusual among AI-adjacent residencies. The grant sits across the data, training, and weights layers because residents working in AI-for-science have the inputs to produce open models, open training data, and open scientific code as a single deliverable.