Funding Announcement: GrantScout

This is a cross-post of our April 16, 2024 post here.

Helping founders access capital is a mission near and dear to us as investors — but beyond venture capital, there is a massive source of non-dilutive capital many business owners overlook: the US Government. Felicia Chen and Jennifer Jang, co-founders of GrantScout, have set out to make it easier than ever to find, apply for, and win government grant funding. We’re delighted to announce we’ve co-led their seed round and are partnering with them on this mission.

At Adverb, we back extraordinary founders in the earliest stages of building breakout companies. We met Felicia and Jennifer in the Fall 2023 HF0 incubator batch, a program where repeat founders live together in SF for an intensive period of early company development. Their combined experience at companies like Waymo, Anduril, and Apple and the company’s early traction with grant applicants stood out to us.

Typically, applying for a government grant is tedious and time consuming. It can take hundreds of hours and even require hiring a specialized grant writer to complete the cumbersome government driven process. Grantscout leverages AI to simplify this. With a basic description of a company, their AI powered search engine can identify specific grants which may be applicable for a given company. And with additional company information, their fine tuned LLM can draft the application while still leveraging the expert final review of an in-house grant writer.

GrantScout is starting with a focus on Small Business Innovation Grants (SBIRs) — a source of $3.5B awarded annually and ultimately aims to tackle the much larger government grant and contracting opportunity.

GrantScout is already being used by customers building innovative products in healthcare, defense, climate, robotics, etc from early stage to growth stage. And 95% of early customers have already come back for a second grant application. Check it out yourself to see if your team might scout a match!