# Chan Zuckerberg Initiative

> The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) is a philanthropy and technology organization founded in 2015 by Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, structured as an LLC. Once spanning education, science, justice reform and housing, CZI has refocused on a single audacious goal: helping scientists cure, prevent or manage all disease by the end of the century. Its flagship CZ Biohub network now builds AI 'virtual cell' models, generates massive biological datasets, and ships free open-source tools so researchers everywhere can move faster.

- **Founded:** 2015
- **Headquarters:** Redwood City, California, United States
- **Founders:** Priscilla Chan (Co-Founder & Co-CEO), Mark Zuckerberg (Co-Founder & Co-CEO)
- **Team size:** ~560 employees (after a roughly 8% reduction in early 2026 to refocus on AI biology)
- **Products:** CZ Biohub Network, Virtual Cells Platform, CZ CELLxGENE, CZ ID (formerly IDseq), protocols.io
- **Notable:** Awarded approximately $7.22 billion in grants since 2015 and invested nearly $300 million in mission-aligned ventures., Built the CZ Biohub network and helped pioneer large-scale AI-for-biology research., Released a 'world model of protein biology' including ESM Atlas mapping 6.8 billion proteins.

## Products & services

- **CZ Biohub Network** — A research network spanning San Francisco, Chicago and New York that unites scientists, engineers, and AI experts to push the frontier of AI for biology, with collaborations across Stanford, UC Berkeley and UCSF.
- **Virtual Cells Platform** — AI models that simulate how cells work, respond to their environment, malfunction in disease, and might be reprogrammed. Includes freely available models such as VariantFormer, CryoLens and scLDM.
- **CZ CELLxGENE** — An open platform to explore, analyze and share single-cell datasets in the browser, used widely by the genomics community.
- **CZ ID (formerly IDseq)** — An open-source cloud platform for metagenomic analysis to detect and track infectious diseases.
- **protocols.io** — A platform for developing, sharing and discovering reproducible research methods.
- **ESM / Protein World Models** — A protein-structure prediction model, a protein language model, and ESM Atlas - a map of 6.8 billion proteins and 1.1 billion predicted structures.
- **Essential Open Source Software for Science (EOSS)** — Grant program funding the open-source software tools that modern biomedical research depends on.

## Achievements

- Awarded approximately $7.22 billion in grants since 2015 and invested nearly $300 million in mission-aligned ventures.
- Built the CZ Biohub network and helped pioneer large-scale AI-for-biology research.
- Released a 'world model of protein biology' including ESM Atlas mapping 6.8 billion proteins.
- Committed $500 million to the Virtual Biology Initiative in 2026.
- Created widely used open tools including CELLxGENE, CZ ID and protocols.io.

## Latest updates

- **2026-05** — CZ Biohub unveiled an AI 'world model' of proteins, including a structure-prediction model, a protein language model, and ESM Atlas.
- **2026-04** — Biohub announced the Virtual Biology Initiative, a five-year, $500M effort to build predictive models of life and release new virtual-cell models (VariantFormer, CryoLens, scLDM).
- **2026-02** — CZI cut roughly 70 jobs (~8% of staff) to refocus on AI-powered biomedical research and the Biohub network.
- **2025** — Chan and Zuckerberg laid groundwork to remake CZI around AI-powered biomedical research, winding down several other program areas.

## Links

- Website: https://chanzuckerberg.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/chan-zuckerberg-initiative
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/ChanZuckerberg
- GitHub: https://github.com/chanzuckerberg
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ChanZuckerbergInitiative
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chanzuckerberginitiative/

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Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-06-02