GPUAngel
Round 1 · open until Dec 15, 2026

An angel round, paid in GPU hours.

Free GPU credits for students and indie builders who want to test an AI hypothesis or ship an MVP. About 20 hours on an H100. No equity, no strings.

Apply in 2 minutes How it works

6 grants this round · credits land in your Vast.ai account

20h
H100 · ON 80
+ $40 in credits0% equityany GPU on Vast
≈$40
in GPU credits per grant
≈20 h
on an H100 at today's marketplace prices
6
grants in Round 1
0%
equity. It's a gift, not a deal.

How it works

From idea to first run in four steps

01

Apply

Tell us what you want to test or build and what compute it needs. One short form, about two minutes.

02

Get picked

We read every application and reply to everyone by email. We look for a sharp question, a realistic plan and a way to share the result.

03

Receive credits

Create a free Vast.ai account and give us its email. We transfer the credits straight to it. No codes, nothing to pay.

04

Build and share

Rent any GPU on Vast.ai and run your experiment. Then send us a demo repo or short write-up, and we'll feature it here.

Who it's for

Built for the first experiment, not the hundredth

A good fit

  • Students with a course project or thesis that needs a real GPU
  • Indie builders who need a working demo before anyone will back them
  • Researchers testing one sharp hypothesis
  • Open-source maintainers who need GPU time for tests or a live demo
  • Artists training a LoRA or fine-tuning an image model

Not a fit

  • Mining, reselling or idling compute
  • Long pre-training runs a grant covers about 20 GPU-hours
  • Anything against Vast.ai's terms of service

Ideas we'd love to fund

Fine-tune a 7B model on your own dataTrain an SDXL LoRABenchmark open models on your taskHost a live demo for your paperReproduce a result you don't quite believe

Round 1

Six slots. Each becomes a project.

When a grant goes out, its slot turns into a card with the project's name and a link to what it built.

Slot 01Open
Slot 02Open
Slot 03Open
Slot 04Open
Slot 05Open
Slot 06Open
[your photo]

Behind GPUAngel

Hi, I'm Artem.

I'm an indie AI developer: I build Hugging Face Spaces and SDXL LoRA models. GPUAngel is my small personal fund for the first GPU-hours of other people's ideas, a few projects at a time.

PortfolioHugging FaceThreads

FAQ

Questions, answered

Is it really free?

Yes. No equity, no fees and no payment details. We only ask that you share what you built, so the next builder can learn from it.

What exactly do I get?

About $40 of credit, sent to your Vast.ai account. It's a dollar balance, so you pick the hardware: roughly 20 hours on an H100 at current marketplace prices, or far longer on a smaller card.

How are projects chosen?

A clear question or product, a plan that fits about 20 GPU-hours and a way to share the result. You don't need publications, funding or a team.

Why give compute away?

Because the price of a GPU shouldn't decide which ideas get tested. Twenty GPU-hours is a small cost for us and a real start for you.

Are you part of Vast.ai or NVIDIA?

No. GPUAngel is an independent project. We buy credits on Vast.ai and transfer them to you. Product names belong to their owners.

Do you earn anything from this?

One small thing, disclosed up front: if you sign up for Vast.ai through our referral link, Vast.ai adds 3% of what you later spend to our fund. It costs you nothing and pays for future grants. Existing accounts are welcome too.

Your idea deserves a first run.

Round 1 closes on December 15, 2026. Six grants, about 20 H100-hours each. Applying takes two minutes.

Open the application