I grew up around public education. Both of my parents are school district superintendents, so I had always understood that schools were constantly trying to do more with less.
What I did not understand was how much work went into finding the money that made many of those programs possible.
In August 2025, my mom asked me to help her grants team find new funding opportunities for her district. I assumed I would spend a few hours searching around, send her a list, and move on.
Instead, I found a process that felt strangely difficult for something so important.
Her team was spending weeks searching across different websites for opportunities, reading through long eligibility requirements, keeping track of deadlines, and then writing applications that could take days or weeks to finish. For especially complicated grants, organizations would sometimes bring in outside consultants who could take a meaningful percentage of the funding they helped secure.
The surprising part was that the funding itself was out there. The difficult part was finding the right opportunities and actually getting through the process of applying for them.
I wanted to know whether this was specific to my mom’s district, so I started talking to other organizations.
I spoke with grant administrators at school districts, nonprofits, universities, and government organizations. Eventually, those conversations grew into more than 100 discovery interviews.
The organizations were different, but the workflow was very similar.
Small teams were constantly searching for grants, figuring out whether they qualified, digging through old organizational documents for the same information, drafting applications, and trying to keep everything organized across spreadsheets, documents, emails, and grant portals.
They were being asked to bring more money into their organizations without being given more people and tools to do so.
That was the problem that became GrantWare.
The idea was to give an organization one place where it could teach the system who it was once, rather than starting from scratch every time it found a new grant.
An organization could upload the documents it already had: an annual report, strategic plan, previous proposals, budgets, or information about its programs. GrantWare would use that context to build a profile of the organization and continuously search for funding opportunities that actually matched it.
From there, the same context followed the organization through the rest of the process.
GrantWare could help determine whether an opportunity was worth pursuing, explain why the organization was eligible, pull together the information needed for an application, help draft the proposal, and keep the work organized through submission.
What started as helping my mom search for a few grants eventually became a startup.
I led a team through building and launching GrantWare, and along the way, we secured funding and technical sponsorship from Red Hat, were selected as one of ten companies for Boston University’s $10,000 Summer Accelerator, and became a finalist in its $80,000 Venture Competition.
The part of GrantWare that interested me most was the idea that a lot of important organizations are not missing opportunities because the funding does not exist. They miss them because finding, understanding, and pursuing that funding requires an enormous amount of administrative work.
GrantWare was an attempt to make that process easier for organizations.