OpenGrants

Grant funds are unique, they require no-repayment, and are non-dilutive. These funds are typically the first resources deployed to combat everything from natural disasters to tackling deep tech challenges from cancer to climate technology. Unfortunately this critical resource struggles with significant issues around efficiency, transparency, traceability and equity.

We must implement solutions that modify how grant funding operates, in ways that do not impact the core tenets of the system. In other words, we must protect and empower all peoples’ abilities to develop new solutions, create value, and make progress.

We’ve built a grant search engine and powered it with the most comprehensive database of public and private grant funding. We’re layering on features like recommended grants, custom query search, team collaboration, confidence scores and automated alerts to create the most valuable grant search tool in the industry.

The future of grant funding has no applications. The current approach to awarding funding is something that is simply a hold-over from another era. At best, this practice is still around because of a lack of the correct tools. Similar to modern loans generated by lenders with a continuous understanding of your financials, the future of grant funding is based on a trustless ecosystem, where capital partners have all of the data they need to approve and provide funding, while managing their risk.

The ultimate goal of this platform is to support awarding of grants via single profiles which are efficiently linked to networking of grant funders. We serve state and federal government agencies, local governments, global NGOs, private foundations, family offices, and any other organization that needs to distribute funding in a streamlined, modern and data-driven manner.

Our future roadmap includes a robust web3 strategy, post-award grant management, and a capital holding and distribution product with tools for reporting, auditing and compliance. This serves the needs of both applicants and funders, while enabling new transparency into funding effectiveness, including historical performance and benchmarks for mandated metrics like diversity and team size. Administrators will gain real-world insights on desired impacts, something that is remarkably rare today.

We are specifically engaged in a mission to include our ecosystem and community partners as financial partners in this venture. For that reason, contractors on our platform have access to $GRANT and can receive equity in the company. Additionally, we are raising capital using a variety of tools to ensure that taxpayers and citizens around the world can participate in developing this company into the source of public good that it should be.

Our focus over the next few years will be to continue to embrace an API-first future, where OpenGrants will efficiently provide ecosystem data and grant matching tools, as well as modern financial infrastructure. We seek to become global, public infrastructure, that is in part, owned by the public. Integrations with our partners will support the quality and capabilities of the ecosystem overall, further enriching our own data products and improving the ML and AI driven matching and evaluation features.

Case Studies

ChicoStart is a business incubator for startups and a community for entrepreneurs located in rural northern California. With a myriad of activities and companies to support, their main constraint is bandwidth and human capital. They struggled to get the right information about grant funding to the correct people in a timely fashion. They also know that grants are an important source of funding, but lack the time and ability to extend that knowledge and understanding to their portfolio of startups.

They engaged OpenGrants in an early BETA of the platform to explore the impacts of the tool on their community of startup founders and stakeholders. As a result of the pilot, seven companies submitted grant applications during that quarter, and a few were recently awarded several million dollars in funding for their projects. ChicoStart was also recently awarded NSF funding for their work in supporting this ecosystem.

Eva Nicole, Executive Director at ChicoStart and a Director of The Center for Entrepreneurship at CSU Chico: 

“We’re grateful that someone took a hard look at the unnecessary complexities of the grants market and decided to fix it. We value OpenGrants’ ability to provide us timely information on grants that we otherwise wouldn’t have time to look for. This helps us provide relevant info to our startups, partnerships and Chicostart itself. We’re excited to pursue a partnership that will benefit our ecosystem in the future.”

Case Study 2

Vesto was founded in 2019 with the goal of creating a simple and easy-to-use digital banking platform powered by cryptocurrency. They’re now focused on banking-as-a-service to help financial institutions take advantage of blockchain and digital currencies.

Aaron Brown, Co-founder and COO:

"There’s a lot of compliance that a financial institution needs to do, and blockchain provides a much higher level of security than typical databases. Being able to have financial products on the blockchain-based on smart contracts is the next generation of the financial institution. We have collateralized interest income and loans based on the digital wallet holder’s balance. Blockchain really makes finance consumer-centric rather than institution-centric.We have IP that we think is very unique. Regulators around the world are trying to figure out how to audit to make sure transactions are real. The grant that we just worked on with the help of a consultant we found on OpenGrants will be used to establish a technology that we patented, that allows for those regulators to successfully audit transactions.To me, as a small business person, whether it’s grants or any other sort of bureaucratic regulatory issues, it’s difficult to become an expert. You’re the chef, cook and bottle washer in a small business. Partnering with a company like OpenGrants means you don’t have to understand all the nuances of how grants work, and you don’t have to go find the grants.What I’ve learned is that it’s not just about having a grant writer, it’s also having someone who’s knowledgeable in the space and has connections and relationships with the state and federal governments that are providing the grants. Also, things move around and budgets change. Having an expert partner to be that resource, rather than having to learn and do it all yourself, is so useful.OpenGrants helps to cut through the bureaucracy. It doesn’t feel like you’re working with a government entity. Those were nightmares for me going back 10 or 15 years. My goodness, the applications are ridiculous. OpenGrants cuts through all that.The fact that OpenGrants help small businesses with this stuff was music to my ears because I’m a third generation small business owner, and if you can learn how to take advantage of free non-dilutive money, that can make all the difference. Especially because there’s a lot of money that people don’t even know they’re eligible for."