Grant funding is the lifeblood of many nonprofit organizations. But finding grants, applying to them and winning them can often be a time-intensive, fruitless venture.
Philip Deng is hoping to change that.
Deng is the CEO and founder of Grantable, a startup whose technology is designed to help grant writers draft proposals up to seven times faster.
“Grantable is unifying the grant-seeking process into one platform,” he said.
Deng knows first-hand the challenges of grant writing. As the founder of a nonprofit organization in Seattle, Washington, Deng said he spent thousands of hours writing grant proposals over a five-year stretch, landing only two $5,000 grants.
“It was just heart breaking,” he said.
Eventually, he had to fold his non-profit and was hired to lead grant-seeking operations for a large Seattle nonprofit. At the new company, where leadership was predominately white, Deng said he was surprised to find the process much easier.
“We could almost win grants by accident,” he said.
The experience changed the way he looked at grant writing.
“I started to understand the systemic barriers and the outdated systems that were creating both inefficiency and inequity,” Deng said.
He relocated to Richmond in March 2020 and created a tool for himself to write grants more quickly. Deng then took that tool to the next level, developing software that helped him and his clients generate proposals more quickly.
The software stores an organization’s previous grant proposals in a library, then uses search and AI capabilities to enable the grant writer to locate and reuse content and data. By streamlining some of the writing process, grant writers can focus more on their storytelling approach, submit more grants and, ideally, improve their win rate.
The software also supports collaboration between different writers, a frequent dynamic in grant writing. Future plans for Grantable include helping organizations find grants as well, he said.
In 2020, Deng said, his prototype helped capture more than $1 million in funding.
Grantable was accepted into the Idea Factory, a Startup Virginia program, enabling him to further grow his grant technology idea. Another break came when the startup was accepted into the Lighthouse Labs spring 2021 cohort.
“We are really grateful to be building Grantable in the Richmond community because of the really cohesive and collaborative startup environment that is here,” Deng said.
Richmond’s strong nonprofit community also helps, he said, since that’s Grantable’s main target audience. Other organizations like businesses and government entities that apply for grants can also benefit from the software, Deng added.
Deng is performing beta testing with select organizations now and plans to launch Grantable later this year.