Stacy L ChinFounder, KeepYourEquity · I get the government to write you checks

Why Startups Struggle

25 Jan 2026 · 2 min

Watch on YouTube

1:38

In this monologue, the speaker outlines three major hurdles that startups face when seeking federal funding: (1) difficulty locating relevant grants due to poor search functionality, outdated resources, and siloed information on grants.gov; (2) the massive time investment required to prepare competitive SBIR applications—up to 200 hours per proposal; and (3) extensive post‑award compliance and management requirements that can jeopardize continued funding. To address these pain points, the speaker introduces Scout, an AI‑driven platform that aggregates thousands of federal grant, contract, and RFP databases and matches startups to suitable solicitations. Scout also offers an accelerated SBIR writing service (GRIT) that can produce full technical applications within a day, claiming 20× faster funding acquisition, 30% of traditional costs, and a 70% reduction in grant‑writer effort. The solution promises to streamline discovery, application, and compliance, dramatically lowering the resource burden for startup founders.

Chapters

One, it's really hard to find grants. Has anyone scoured a database and spent hours on grants.gov trying to find grants for their startup? How frustrating is it, right? Like, keyword searches don't work. Grants.gov have outdated resources, so it's really difficult, especially since everything is siloed. Two, once you find a grant, even with an SBIR, it could take up to 200 hours to put together one application, especially something super competitive. And then three, once you get this awarded, there are a bunch of red tape, compliance, post-award management systems that you have to have in place in order to make sure you still get the payments allocated throughout the award. So there's a lot of issues right now, and so we're developing a platform solution where our platform can leverage AI to help you guys get funding 20 times faster and at 30% of the cost. Instead of doing that, you can upload all your materials into Scout, and we use this like customized AI matching where we try to understand the narrative that you have, the solicitations that are out there, and we're finding a nice fit of what solicitations out there. And this is across all federal database, not just SBIRs. So our, um, AI grant matching system has thousands of databases. We're almost there to release federal contracts in addition to grants, foundational and SAFE, and also RFPs. Two, once you find a grant, our first beachhead is the SBIR program. We have Accelerated GRIT, uh, writing out there. And so again, same thing, when you write an SBIR application, work someone up in the legacy company like a consultant, get to tell me everything what you're doing, I gotta go read your materials, come back to you and ask you a bunch of questions, and then kind of go away and give you a crappy first draft within 10 days. Instead of doing that, we can upload your system, do an intense one-on-one call with you, and we've written full technical applications within the first same day, which is really exciting. And so we found that processes has saved our grant writers' time by at least 70%.