Business Chain tracks 186 funding programmes right now. 44 of them will take an applicant from anywhere, no passport, no registered office, no local co-founder required. If you are building outside the US and Europe and you keep getting stopped at the residency question on national grant portals, that list of 44 is where your time goes. You can see all of them at businesschain.us/funds/region/global.
A smaller global cheque beats a bigger national one
Founders chase the big national grant first because the number looks better on paper. That's usually the wrong order. A national programme has to verify you are who the law says you are: tax residency, a local bank, sometimes a local co-founder with voting control. Each of those checks is a queue, and the queue is run by people who were not hired to move fast. A worldwide programme skips that whole verification layer because it was built for applicants it can never fully verify, so it substitutes other proof instead. NLnet Foundation Grants will give a first-time applicant between €5,000 and €50,000, and the next deadline is fixed: November 3rd 2026, 12:00 CET. There is nothing to negotiate about your tax domicile. Trailblazer 2.0 from Arbitrum Foundation has $1M split across submissions capped at $10k each, and the cap exists precisely so they don't have to run deep diligence on every applicant's home jurisdiction.
What replaces the residency test
- An incorporated entity, anywhere. Most of these programmes want a legal entity that can sign a grant agreement and be held to it, not a company registered in a specific country.
- A bank account or wallet that can actually receive the money. Base Builder Grants pays 1 to 5 ETH and Starknet Seed Grants pays up to $25,000 in STRK, both settled in crypto, which means no SWIFT wire and no local bank branch standing between the award and your wallet.
- An application written in English. Every programme on this list runs its review in English, so the barrier isn't geography, it's whether your team can write the proposal clearly in a second language.
- Enough time zone overlap to join calls or cohorts if the programme needs them. Entrepreneur First runs an equity-free grant for ideation and then up to $250K once a company is actually formed, but that path runs through a cohort, and a cohort means scheduled sessions you have to be awake for.
Where the money actually gets stuck
Being awarded a grant and receiving the grant are two different events, and the gap between them is where founders outside the US and Europe lose weeks. Milestone-based programmes like Flare Grants Program release funds per milestone under a signed agreement, so the blocker isn't the award, it's whether your entity can legally sign and be paid under that agreement at all. The Graph grants program currently has no open RFPs, which is its own kind of blocker: there is nothing to apply to until the Foundation opens a new round, no matter how ready your proposal is. Open Technology Fund runs several named funds, including Rapid Response and FOSS Sustainability, each with its own intake, so the practical blocker is simply picking the fund that matches your project before you write anything. And a programme that doesn't publish an amount at all, like PARP Support for Small and Medium Companies, forces you to read each individual call's budget line rather than trust a headline figure, because the headline figure doesn't exist.
Which to try first
- NLnet Foundation Grants: a fixed deadline (November 3rd 2026, 12:00 CET) and a real range (€5,000 to €50,000) beats anything with no stated date. Apply to this first simply because you know exactly when the decision clock starts.
- Starknet Seed Grants: no application deadline, reviewed in rounds on an ongoing basis, up to $25,000 in STRK. Good second application because there's no date pressure and nothing to lose by submitting early.
- Trailblazer 2.0: the $10k per-submission cap means fast review, not a six-month committee process, if your project fits the agentic DeFi brief.
- Entrepreneur First: only worth it if you're genuinely pre-idea or pre-team, since the equity-free grant is for ideation and the $250K only shows up once you've already formed a company inside their process.
- MassChallenge and MIT Solve: both pay non-dilutive cash with zero equity taken, but neither has confirmed open dates right now, so bookmark them and check back rather than building a timeline around them.
- Grand Challenges from the Gates Foundation: only relevant if you're in global health or development, but worth noting the GHTA deadlines run from August 25, 2026 through January 9, 2027, so there's a real window to plan around even without a published amount.