Founder Runway to Launch NICER (European AI Safety Institute)

Raising $50,000active

Providing full-time founder runway to launch NICER: a European institute building the regulatory infrastructure to audit frontier AI agents post-deployment.

Project Details

NICER (New Intelligence Centre for Emerging Risks) will be an independent AI safety institute based in Warsaw and Munich. I am transitioning full-time to build this as another Tech for Impact organization. Before that, I co-founded Tech To The Rescue – a global foundation I scaled to 30 staff and deployed $15M+ in tech infrastructure.

At NICER, we fix the gap between technical AI alignment research in frontier labs and public-sector enforcement. Researchers build safety mechanisms, but governments lack the engineering capacity to enforce them in the real world. We solve this through training and deployment of "Applied Research Auditors" – researchers who can run behavioural evaluations on autonomous agents and at the same time draft enforceable regulatory standards for European institutions.

Funding from this project would cover my 6-8 month personal runway. I am handling operations, fundraising, and coalition-building so my team of volunteers – including Jan Dubiński, PhD (Astra Fellow at Constellation, Researcher at Truthful AI) and Bart Kubiak (Oxford MPP, AI Policy Officer) – can focus entirely on alignment research.

Without this runway, I will be forced to take corporate consulting contracts, delaying NICER’s launch by 12-18 months and completely missing the critical regulatory window that is open right now.

The concrete outputs for this grant phase are:

Formally incorporating the foundation and establishing its legal structures.
Signing our first agreements (MoUs) with public institutions in continental Europe to run pilot audit programs.
Closing our $2.5M–3M institutional seed round to hire the founding technical team full-time and launch the Fellowship program to train the AI Auditors.

Theory of Impact

Technical alignment research alone won't prevent catastrophic outcomes. If researchers make an alignment breakthrough, it only works if public institutions can deploy and enforce those safety regulations in the real world.

As models reach the recursive self-improvement stage and agentic capabilities, they will interact continuously with real-world infrastructure (national databases, live APIs, shared workspaces). Unsafe behaviours, deployment misgeneralization, and alignment drift will happen post-deployment. Right now, regulators rely on static, point-in-time audits. They completely lack the engineering capacity to conduct continuous behavioural monitoring.

This creates a structural x-risk – governments risk handing critical infrastructure to self-improving agents while completely lacking the technical ability to detect deceptive alignment or loss of control. We want to reduce this critical risk by building the downstream regulatory muscle. We will deploy technical experts who understand both neural networks and regulatory constraints to monitor these systems.

Europe provides a critical strategic wedge via the Brussels Effect. The EU AI Act is the world’s first major AI regulatory framework. If the EU enforces it using static, outdated methodologies, it sets a dangerous global precedent. By solving the government's immediate problem of enforcing the AI Act – NICER architects the underlying technical infrastructure.

People

Daniel Di Giusto

Team Member

Grants Received– no grants recorded

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Funding Asks

grantmaking.ai Launch Round

Applied

Minimum

$50,000

Ideal

$77,149

How the money will be spent

This funding covers Phase 0: my transition runway required to launch the institute and secure Phase 1 (our seed round).

Minimum ($50,000):
Buys 7-8 months of full-time focus, allowing me to decline outside consulting contracts.

Base Living Stipend: ~$3,900/month for rent, healthcare, and basic family expenses in Krakow, Poland.
Travel & Coalition Building: Flights and accommodation for fundraising and partner meetings in European hubs (London, Brussels, Munich) and the Bay Area.
Entity Setup & Legal: Minimum founding capital for a Polish Foundation and legal counsel for international philanthropic compliance.
Estimated Tax: ~21% personal income tax liability on the transition stipend (mandatory in Poland).

More DETAILS HERE

Ideal ($77,149):
Provides a full 12 months of runway. This extra time de-risks the fundraising process, giving me a solid year to close our seed round. (Note: If I close our institutional round early, I will transition to a NICER salary and return any unused grant runway to the funders.)

Best Version ($2,500,000):
The best version of this project eliminates the runway phase entirely and immediately seeds the institute. This represents Phase 1 of our 3-year funding roadmap (Round 1: $2.5M -> Round 2: $8M -> Round 3: $12M = total $23M).

A $2.5M seed round fully staffs the core technical team for over a year, sets up our compute/evaluation infrastructure, and launches the inaugural cohort of the Fellowship program to train ~30-60 AI "Polyglots" annually.

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