Fostering Innovation and Economic Opportunity: The Llama Impact Grant Recipients

We’re excited to introduce the 10 international recipients of the second Llama Impact Grants. The grant recipients were announced at today’s LlamaCon, a one-day event to share the creativity, technology and entrepreneurial spirit advancing AI. 

These grants make up over $1.5 million USD in awards and are intended to spur innovation among companies, startups and universities using Llama to create economic and social value. 

Because Llama is open sourced, it is free to use and a powerful tool for creating economic growth and developing cutting-edge tech. Anyone with an idea can use Llama to build a tool and start a company. 

The second Llama Impact Grants recognize standout companies, startups and universities using Llama to drive transformative change, with solutions that range from AI insights for farmers to supporting the digital economy through fraud detection. These organizations are building the tech that makes tomorrow possible, and we’re glad to celebrate and support their efforts. 

Describing why they’ve turned to open source AI, one of the winners, the University of Auckland, said that “open models such as Llama have shown that they can produce high-quality feedback, support multilingual interactions and enable novel learning activities…For us, this means we are not forced to trade off between performance and openness – we can achieve both!”

Announcing the Llama Impact Grant Recipients

North America:

E.E.R.S. (US) is a Llama-powered chatbot developed by entertwine, Inc. that helps people navigate public services. For the chatbot’s initial phase, entertwine has collaborated with the Medi Community Resource Center – a nonprofit that works to connect communities to healthcare and social services – to create a solution that can be easily integrated with government databases. The grant will help them scale and pursue those integrations. 

Solo Tech (US) uses Llama to offer offline, multilingual AI support for underserved rural communities with limited internet access. This includes insights for farmers, medical assistance for doctors and learning solutions in schools. The grant will help them to equip 50 rural centers with AI tools while empowering local professionals and advancing the development of physical AI solutions. 

EMEA:

Doses AI (UK) leverages Llama in building an autonomous pharmacy system that transforms traditional medication dispensing and pharmacy operations, while maintaining pharmacist final check for patient safety. With Llama’s advanced vision and text processing system, their technology can process prescriptions, automate stock ordering, guide robotic retrieval systems to match prescriptions and detect potential errors in real time. The grant will help them accelerate the development of their LLM-powered robotic dispensing system.  

The University of Padova’s (Italy) TaccLab research group is using Llama to transform antibiotic discovery and generate new antibiotic molecules with the help of large datasets of chemical and biological sequences. The grant will help them make AI-assisted drug discovery and material innovation more efficient, enabling the validation of new chemical compounds while speeding up research timelines and reducing costs.

Counterfake (Turkey) provides an online brand protection solution. They use Llama models in their pipelines to catch counterfeiters, helping brands protect their reputation from fraudulent online products, and consumers protect themselves from falling victim to ecommerce scams. The grant will help them develop an API solution for counterfeit detection.

FoondaMate (Sub-Saharan Africa) is a multilingual study tool. Four million resource-limited students across Africa use the chat interface on WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger for exam prep and schoolwork help; in addition, it’s offered in 10 languages and over 30 countries, including Colombia, Mexico, Brazil and Indonesia in addition to countries across Sub-Saharan Africa, making FoondaMate truly global. The grant will help them reach even more in-need students around the world with accessible, AI-guided learning.

Latin America: 

Nova Escola (Brazil) is a non-profit organization that equips public school educators across Brazil with digital tools and resources. Their AlfaTutor tool uses Llama to help teachers craft personalized lesson plans suited to the unique needs of each student and is accessible even in regions with limited internet connectivity. The grant will support the development and large-scale implementation of the solution.

BluEye (Mexico) is building, in partnership with LEX University, a mobile app to improve hurricane preparedness and response. Using real-time data from official APls and Llama, BluEye provides personalized information, including early warnings, interactive maps and educational resources, that allow users to make informed decisions before, during and after a weather event, even in areas with limited connectivity. The grant will help them improve their offerings and expand their geographic reach.

APAC: 

The University of Auckland (New Zealand) uses Llama to create accessible, multilingual tools that aid novice programmers and drive digital literacy. Their Explain in Plain Language (EiPL) and Prompt Problems project guides students as they develop foundational coding skills. Driven by AI code generation, students receive immediate, transparent and actionable feedback as they develop skills in code understanding and prompt engineering. With the grant, the University will explore novel feedback mechanisms, support additional programming languages and improve multilingual support, with an emphasis on Indic languages.

Nayana (India) has been developed by Cognitive Lab, an India-based research lab with an open-source-first approach, to give access to advanced AI capabilities to more than three billion people in underserved language communities globally. This project is a Multimodal Language Model that integrates Llama to automate complex document and image processing across multiple languages. The grant will support CognitiveLab in expanding Nayana’s language coverage and advancing its overall capabilities to serve low-resource regions more effectively. 

Supporting and Celebrating the Open Source Community

Since opening applications in August 2024, we have supported the open source AI community by hosting nearly 60 global events. These have included accelerator programs, hackathons, competitions and workshops, providing technical mentorship in building on Llama for multiple sectors. 

We’re proud to have introduced you to this round of Llama Impact Grant winners, and we can’t wait to see how their solutions evolve – and the positive impact they’ll have on the world around us. 

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