Fourteen months, and it lost
That was our founder’s first grant application, written after leaving the Department of Defense for entrepreneurship. Fourteen months of work, and it did not win. Quillify exists because of what that year made obvious.
What that year actually taught
The lesson was not that the writing needed to be better. It was that almost none of that fourteen months should have been spent at all. Thousands of time-sensitive opportunities exist, very few of them were ever relevant, and there was no way to tell which was which without reading each one. The proposals then took so long that only a handful could be attempted a year, which meant the odds were set long before anyone wrote a word.
That is a research problem and a throughput problem wearing a writing problem’s clothes. It is also, unhelpfully, the exact shape of problem that punishes the organizations least able to absorb it: the ones with one person doing grants alongside three other jobs.
What we actually believe about this
The most valuable thing software can do here is tell you not to bother. Seven in ten private foundations only fund charities they have already chosen, and they say so on their own tax returns. Knowing that before you spend a week is worth more than any amount of help writing the week you should not have spent.
Nobody wants more opportunities. Every customer we have is already overwhelmed. Selling volume to someone who is drowning is selling them water. The job is subtraction.
The thinking has to stay with the person who has it. Quillify drafts from documents you supply, so the substance in a proposal is substance you already had. That constraint is deliberate, and it is why where funders stand on AI is a page on this site rather than a question we avoid.
Who built it
Wesley Stevens founded Quillify after leaving the Department of Defense. He has spent years working in artificial intelligence, with the DoD and with large corporations, and holds an M.S. in Data Science from Syracuse University and a B.S. in Mathematics from Brigham Young University.
The fourteen-month application was his. That is worth knowing, because it explains why this product spends as much effort telling you not to apply for something as it does helping you apply.
Who we are
Quillify, LLC is an Oklahoma limited liability company, based in Tulsa. Our customers have won $6.5M that we can name the funder for, and we wrote a $300,000 state innovation application with about four hours of human editing on top of it. All four stories, with the numbers, and what Quillify actually is if you arrived here first.
They are nonprofits, manufacturers, university research offices, cities working through their regional planning bodies, tribal organizations, and the grant writers who serve all of the above. That range is deliberate and it is unusual: nearly everything else in this category is built for nonprofits and asks what kind of entity you are before it will help.
Your documents are encrypted, isolated to your organization, and never used to train anybody’s model. How that works, in detail.
Why the numbers on this site are strange
You will notice figures phrased as “3,600 and up” rather than as round marketing numbers. That is because the counts move daily and the pages read them from the product at build time rather than from copy someone typed once.
This is not fastidiousness for its own sake. When we checked the numbers the old site had been publishing, they were wrong in three separate documents at once, all internally consistent and collectively stale. A page that cannot go out of date is worth more than one that reads better.
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