Today, we are delighted to announce the launch of our Open Source Fellowship program, created to foster continued innovation in the open source software community. Our inaugural recipient is Colin McDonnell, the creator of Zod.

With nearly 10 million weekly npm downloads, Zod is an extremely widely-used TypeScript schema declaration and validation library. It should come as no surprise that we use it to help build Clerk, and so we're thrilled to be playing a minor role in its continued evolution.

Specifically, Clerk is sponsoring the development of Zod 4, providing financial support for Colin to dedicate a few months to this next version. In connection with this funding, Colin has agreed to help increase visibility of Clerk to Zod's many users, by sharing our brand within its documentation, readme, RFCs, and his public profile on X.

For more details from Colin's perspective, including more details about the enhancements coming in Zod 4, we encourage reading Zod's announcement. We are enthusiastically aligned with Colin's vision for new approaches to funding open source, including his transparency and candor about the terms of the fellowship.