In this presentation Stacy Chin, a former principal investigator and grant reviewer now with Scout, walks founders through the landscape of U.S. federal non‑dilutive funding, focusing on the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs. She explains why many startups struggle to secure these grants—citing the difficulty of locating opportunities, the time‑intensive nature of grant writing, and the strict formatting and submission requirements. Chin outlines the structure of SBIR/STTR across 11 federal agencies, the three phases (Phase I proof‑of‑concept, Phase II development, Phase III commercialization), and the eligibility rules (U.S. for‑profit small business, PI employment, R&D focus, <500 employees, no duplicate proposals). She details the reviewer criteria: technical merit and innovation, commercialization potential, team and resources, budget alignment, and agency‑specific fit, emphasizing the need to tailor narratives to each agency’s mission. The talk then dives into the NSF “America’s Seed Fund” process, describing the initial 4‑question pitch, the subsequent 15‑page Phase I application, timelines, and how to explore NSF topic areas and past awardees. Chin shares strategic advice—submit multiple applications, secure letters of support, engage program officers early, and align technology to agency priorities. Finally, she introduces Scout’s AI‑driven platform that matches startups to suitable grants, streamlines application preparation, and leverages Scout’s track record of raising over $500 million in non‑dilutive funding. She also notes recent policy updates: SBIR budget expansion, renewal cycles, and the relative stability of funding despite broader federal cuts, with particular attention to climate‑tech impacts.
Chapters
There's about $700 billion of grant available up to grabs. Here we're going to focus on SBIR and STTR sector, and you see there's about $4 billion of funding available across different agencies. A lot of people come to me and say, hey, there's so much grant funding out there, but why can't I get it? And there's a lot of reasons for that. First, it's just really difficult to find grants. I'm not sure if you guys have had the burden of trying to find grant opportunities. It's a lot of keyword searches on grants.gov or different websites with incorrect data. You have to go and scour internet and spend hours just finding the right grants for you and your startup. Two, the grant writing itself is time-consuming. Usually if you go after an SBIR Phase 1 application, you can easily spend up to 50 or 60 hours. And for bigger applications, tapping into like the $1, $2, $5, or $20 million range, you spend even up to 200 hours. And then finally, when you finalize and submit the grant application, there's a lot of other things you have to do. Do you have the right font size? Two, do you have the right submission package in place? Do you have all the supporting and mandatory forms and documents? And are you filling out forms correctly and making you're hitting the submission deadline in time. I've been in this crazy world of federal grants and contracting, helped to secure over $50 million of non-diluted funding through a couple different avenues. I had a small boutique firm prior to Scout, and I also was a PI, a principal investigator, myself for SBIR and STTR funding. I reviewed for the NIH, National Institute of Health, and National Science Foundation. I'm also currently a mentor, Techstars, MassChallenge, C10 Lab. But first, let's talk about the SBIR and STTR program so we can go over this a little bit more. So if you haven't heard of the SBIR and STTR Yep, AFWERX and NSF, fantastic. This is called the Small Business Innovation Research or the Small Business Technology Transfer program, and in my opinion, this is a great way to fund startups willing to fund R&D innovations across 11 different agencies. So about each year, around 6,000 to 7,000 awards are granted out to a lot of small businesses across 11 different federal agencies. So here you can see the NIH has a program, the NSF has a program, DOD has a program, ARPA-E, ARPA-H, etc., etc. And so another question I get is, how do you get these grant funding opportunities? And why do they have these programs? And so the SBIR program is sponsored by the US SBA, the Small Business Association, and their goal is to foster innovation here in the US by giving out funds to small businesses. They want to encourage the development of innovative technologies and solutions, and they also want to promote commercialization. So how do you take all these really innovative ideas and translate them to the commercial market to create revenue and also create jobs and economic growth here in the US? And finally, this is a great way to advance federal research. And so these SBIR programs come in 3 different phases. Phase 1 is all about early-stage proof of concept to establish feasibility. So usually startups in this stage have a really interesting idea, but they're not too sure whether or not it has legs for commercialization just yet. This is a high-risk and high-technology proposal phase where you can take 6 to 12 months to test out a prototype. And if you're successful to get a Phase 1 and you prove out your technology, you then proceed to Phase 2, where you continue your R&D development. Developments, and you start taking your prototype towards commercialization, whether it's a pilot, a clinical trial, or some sort of feasibility in a real-world setting. And these Phase 2 applications span for about 2 years, and you can tap up to $1 or even $2 million of funding non-dilutively. And then finally, some programs have Phase 3, where you have graduated from the Phase 1 and Phase 2 SBIR program. You can establish commercialization through private funding or governmental contracts with an end user so that you can deploy your technology or innovation to the US market. So this all Sounds too good to be true, but there are eligibility criteria that you have to meet in order to qualify for the SBIR and STTR program. First, you have to be a for-profit US-based small business that must be majority owned by at least US citizens or permanent residents. The PI, which is the principal investigator, aka the one that's leading the efforts, have to be primarily employed by the small business. Importantly, you have to propose an R&D activity. So these are meant to be high-risk and highly technical innovation grants to pursue R&D efforts in order to commercialize new technologies. So that means we're not really interested in funding market research or just developing innovations. Finally, this is meant to support small businesses, which by definition means you have less than 500 employees. And then finally, you cannot pursue multiple applications with the same proposal objectives across different agencies. So how do you write a strong SBIR application? So there's 4 different categories I'd like to think about when trying to craft a strong SBIR application. One, the reviewers want to see something that's highly technical and innovative. So they're evaluating, do you Do you have a novel technology? Does your project represent a really innovative solution that has not yet been tested out or widely commercialized? They're looking for the scientific and technical merit. Is your R&D approach rigorous? Is it well documented? Is it aligned to the agency's mission? And then finally, feasibility research plan. Does it make sense what you're proposing in your research development to actually be carried out by the team to meet the goals in order to validate that you have something interesting for the market opportunity? The next thing is commercialization potential. Really important to show that you have commercial potential for your innovation. So to evaluate whether your technology has commercialization potential, they're looking at your market opportunity. Is the problem really big that you're solving? If successful, do you have a competitive advantage by entering the market? And then 3, have you thought of a strategy to bring this product to market, or rather, do you have a go-to-market plan in order to create revenue from this idea? Next, they're looking at your team and resources. Do you have a qualified team of experienced scientists, engineers, or business leaders capable of executing this project? Additionally, if you are developing prototypes, do you have access to facilities and equipment to carry out the R&D research? And finally, are taking a look at your budget— do your costs align to what you want to propose? And with that, does it make sense to carry out what you've developed or you propose to do in your proposal? And then finally, the most important in my opinion, is your technology and your go-to-market aligned with the SBIR funding agencies? So as you can imagine, if you're applying for a grant for the NIH, they might have a different scope and mission statement compared to that of the NSF, the DOD, and the DOE. So before we even start writing, I like to think about the agency's priorities and make sure we tailor our narrative based on what they're looking for to give you a better chance of an award. Finally, you can also get letters of support, except for the NSF SBIR Phase I application, to help validate the idea, or get letters of commercial interest to help support your application. From doing this work for about 10 years, I've learned the secret to an SBIR application is to strategically put more shots out on goal. So usually if you want to raise VC funding, you typically don't go and talk to one VC, but rather you want to talk to multiple VCs, right? And the same idea, you don't want to just put in one grant application, especially if the success rate is less than 10% of getting it the first time. Second, really important to tailor your narrative based on the goals of the agency that you want to apply for. Let me talk more about that in the example in a bit. But either way, these are still very competitive applications. Our team at Scout has raised over $500 million of funding to date, and we're here to kind of help you craft the narrative or just answer any questions you have in order to boost your chances of getting an award. One of the agencies that have SBIR program is the NSF or the National Science Foundation, which is called America's Seed Fund. And we here at Scout really like this program because they're interested in investing in anything that's highly innovative and really groundbreaking in across all different technology sectors. So for that reason, they named this program as America's Seed Fund. And so we find that the NSF SBIR program is a founder-friendly approach. They're super open to new ideas, but they care about cutting-edge research, that high-risk, high-technology innovation, and to fund ideas that would catapult a new category or develop a new solution compared to what's currently out there. This is how the NSF process works, and as I mentioned, each agency has their own different processes, and we can talk about the differences between each of them in a bit as well. So if you're interested in going for the NSF SBIR program, the first step is a project pitch assessment. This is a 4-questionnaire survey where you respond to these 4 questions: the problem statement, technology objectives, your company and market, or the need in the market, and then company and team. And they're going to evaluate whether or not you are a fit to the agencies and their mission statement. Once you submit the application, you'll hear back within 1 or 2 months whether or not the agency is interested and want to invite you to submit a full Phase 1 application. And if you're lucky to get that invitation, that's where the fun begins. So this is where you get to submit a full Phase 1 application, which consists of a 15-page project description, biosketches, budgets, facilities and resources, a budget supporting documents, which takes sometimes on average 2 to 3 months to put together in order to get a competitive application. And we understand that that's a long time frame, so here at SCAL we can reduce that time by at least 70%. And then when you're ready to submit the application, you hear back with your comments about 5 to 6 months later. So the next deadline for this year is November 5th, so in case you're interested in putting together an application, we strongly recommend submitting and preparing your project pitch ASAP. And so these are all the NSF funding priorities that they're interested in funding. So here, let me just blow this up a little bit more. If you look up NSF SBIR Seed Fund, you go under what we fund, and here are all the topic areas that they are interested in. So again, they're— this is a really founder-friendly approach because they're looking for any new innovations in any of these topic areas. And so if you take your cursor and let's just say scroll over advanced materials, you see the subcategories of different types of innovations they're interested in funding. And so I just find this is a fantastic resource to look through and and see, you know, does my technology, my innovation, align to what their funding objectives are looking for? You can even go to View Our Awardees, which is another great resource, and see the different startups that they funded recently and breaking them down by Phase 1, Phase 2, location, or even technology type. So again, this is just a great tool to use in case you're looking into applying for the NSF SBIR program. And then finally, I want to tell you about Scout. Like I mentioned, it takes a lot of time and effort to put together an application, and so we have an AI platform to help founders find grants by using a customized approach, right? Grants by leveraging AI and decades of expertise delivered in the platform and win the grants with our team. So our team has raised over $500 million of funding to date, and if you sign up today, you get free grant matching in the system, which is exciting because finding grants that are the best fit for your company, like I mentioned, takes a very long time. It has been hampered, but the administration, from what I were learning, is that they're not bashing innovation. And so the SBI program is actually up for renewal recently. They extended to another year. If all goes well, they're actually doubling the budget of SBIR application. So instead of having each agency allocate 3.2% of their budgets to the SBIR program, they are trying to push that to 7%. And the SBIR program also renews every 3 years. They're trying to get rid of that so it's a permanent funding agency for early-stage startups and for small businesses. So yes, even though we're seeing some budget cuts in the federal landscape, we're not seeing that impacted too much by— in the SBIR world. You're correct, climate particularly at this point is getting a bit more impacted than the other areas. We also are looking for private and other state funding mechanisms as well to kind of provide that gap? That's a great question, Jason, and it really depends on kind of what you're looking for in terms of the narrative, right? Based on the current administration focus, sometimes it is about crafting a narrative that's more aligned to the agency's priorities. It could be also talking to your program officers, saying, asking, you know, what they're looking for and how we can tailor the funding towards these— your application. And so we also recommend, if you have an opportunity and talk to a program officer, especially for like a DoD, an NIH, before you start writing, to kind of present an idea that you have. It might save you a lot of time. They say 'Hey, this is just something that we're interested in.' And that's why for the NSF, we really enjoy the project pitch because it is a 4-question questionnaire where you can get screened whether or not— and they'll tell you off the get-go whether or not they're interested in your application. So that'd be a good way to see if this idea is even of interest to them before you dedicate the time and effort to put together an application. So we have a lot of best practices. You can talk to people like us that have seen like hundreds of these applications a day. And a lot of times too, it's about crafting the narrative and putting it into a language that speaks to their viewers and agencies. So I find that grant writing has a bit of an art to it as well, and it takes time to kind of understand what that art looks like for the agencies. We focus more on startups that require a lot of capital. So you can think of, like you said, deep tech, health tech, biotech, climate tech, typically at the stages where VCs may not be ready for you guys just yet. So usually those stages, in order to progress your startups and de-risk your technology, a very common way is to find grant funding, right? And that's a way to prepare for VCs, for example, to kind of move things forward. Until you're ready to get that outside capital.
