Short answers, pulled from the story.
Project RAND was established on the 1st of October 1945 under a special contract with the Douglas Aircraft Company, and began operations in December 1945. RAND was formally incorporated as an independent nonprofit corporation on the 14th of May 1948, after separating from Douglas Aircraft.
RAND was founded by Franklin R. Collbohm, an aviation engineer and Douglas Aircraft executive, along with Donald Wills Douglas Sr. and Arthur Emmons Raymond. The immediate impetus was a conversation in September 1945 between Collbohm and General Henry H. "Hap" Arnold, who together determined that the U.S. needed a private organization to preserve wartime scientific expertise.
RAND stands for research and development. Douglas engineer Arthur Emmons Raymond coined the name Project RAND from that phrase when the organization was established in 1945.
RAND receives funding from the U.S. federal government, private endowments, corporations, universities, charitable foundations, state and local governments, international organizations, and foreign governments. In the 2024 fiscal year, RAND's revenues and other support totaled $514 million, of which $328 million came from the U.S. federal government.
Thirty-two Nobel Prize recipients have been associated with RAND, primarily in economics and physics. They include Kenneth Arrow, Robert Aumann, John Forbes Nash Jr., Harry Markowitz, Paul Samuelson, Herbert Simon, Lloyd Shapley, Thomas C. Schelling, Edmund Phelps, and Oliver Williamson.
The RAND Health Insurance Experiment was one of the largest studies of health insurance in American history, designed and conducted by RAND between 1974 and 1982. Funded by the then-U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, it established an insurance corporation to compare demand for health services with their cost to the patient.