Case Study: How Quillify helped Quillify get a $300,000 State level grant from OCAST
OCAST grant applications offer Oklahoma businesses a path to funding, yet only 2-8% of applicants receive awards. Small businesses spend an average of 80 hours on each state level grant application, often missing requirements or failing to match what funders want.
Through AI-powered tools and smart preparation, you can now complete your OCAST application in 5-8 hours. Your business gains a clear advantage in competing for up to $500,000 in matched funding to build innovative technology and add jobs in Oklahoma. This guide shows you how to make your application stand out and win funding for your next project.
OCAST Innovation Grant Requirements
The Oklahoma Center for Advancement in Science and Technology (OCAST) is a state-level organization with a mission to help Oklahoma innovate, create new businesses, develop cutting-edge technology, and ultimately create new jobs. If you're a small business in Oklahoma looking for grants, consider applying to OCAST.
Developing Innovative Technology
When funding businesses, OCAST wants to see that you are developing an innovative technology that will bring a significant amount of money into the state and create many high-value, high-paying jobs. They also want to see that you are bridging the gap between public and private partnerships.
Your OCAST grant application should clearly show, backed by data, that you know exactly what research and development to do and that you are well-positioned to do it. Quantify the exact amount of economic impact that you will make and specify the number of jobs that will come out of your innovation. Include a timeline of when OCAST can expect to see those specific numbers of jobs and economic prosperity.
Calculate data such as market size, market impact, and market reach directly resulting from the OCAST grant. Specify exactly who or what type of people you will bring into Oklahoma or fund that currently live in Oklahoma.
Retaining Talent in Oklahoma
OCAST is trying to answer the question of how to keep talent in Oklahoma and not let all the great minds coming out of universities like OU, OSU, and TU leave for other states because of job opportunities. They want to create high-value jobs to retain the talent they are creating.
Generating and Protecting Intellectual Property
OCAST also wants to see that you are doing something that will generate intellectual property (IP) and that you will be able to protect that IP in the future. Having something innovative and impactful, not just a wrapper over someone else's service, is highly valuable.
Public and Private Partnerships
OCAST also looks at the public and private partnerships side of things. Include letters of support from community partners and explain how you will work with them and that they have or have seen a great need for your innovation in the local ecosystem.
Here's an example: When Quillify applied for the 2024 OCAST grant, we got letters from the Tulsa Regional Chamber, Oklahoma Defense Industry Association, and Oklahoma Manufacturing Alliance, a current customer of Quillify. They all expressed the same sentiment - applying for grants takes a lot of time and effort, and if Quillify can help the businesses they serve get more grants, that will be highly valuable.
Small Business Grant Application Process Before AI
Everyone is feeling the squeeze of capital. Traditional capital is becoming more selective, and people need an alternative because banks aren't giving out loans to companies to grow unless they're well beyond the point where they desperately need it to create the impact they're hoping to create.
The Challenges of Securing Funding
Venture capital wants to see that you're already a growth rocket. They don't want to help you go from $1,000 a month to $10,000 a month. Private equity only works with you if you're above $5 million in your revenue. There's a big gap for companies who are in the $0 to $2 million range that need access to capital, that aren't high-growth rockets, but they're making a solid impact in solving a real problem in their vertical.
Grants are really the only other option to turn to other than just coming out of pocket or bootstrapping until you can have enough customers to start feeling the growth yourself. The problem with grants is that it a very cumbersome process.
The Difficulties of the Grant Application Process
For federal level grants, Quillify's first federal grant took us 14 months to write. And then when we finally submitted it, we didn't get it. That's because, from the federal data points of SBIR funding:
Less than 10% of all applications actually get funded
Less than 25% of those applications get follow-on funding
Keep in mind, each of these applications are taking experienced grant writers somewhere around 300 hours on a federal level to write and somewhere around 100 hours to 150 hours at a state level to write. Everything below that is too difficult to find or too preferential toward, you know, people that the private foundations have worked with in the past to be much of use.
The Need for an Edge in Grant Applications
Businesses need an edge when applying to state and federal level grant opportunities. They're strapped for time. They have limited resources, limited people who can actually execute and do things.
Consider this: do I invest the two to four weeks of time investing in a grant like the OCAST Innovation Initiative grant and potentially get it at a 2% success rate, or do I spend it building my business and talking, trying to make sales with customers, and you know, all the other million things that a small business owner needs to do?
Small businesses need an edge. They need something than can tell them about new grant opportunities that are directly in their line of sight and help them to apply to those grant opportunities quickly and affordably. With that edge, grants would become much more of a catalyst for economic growth and business success outside of the 0.1% that actually get venture capital investment or the less than 5% that make it to seven figures.
Common Pitfalls in Grant Applications
When Quillify was writing its first NSF grant application, we had to rewrite the entire grant application three times because it was meant to be based in something that was innovative. By the time we finished writing the first 2 iterations, it wasn't far enough on the edge of innovation to qualify for the grant that we were trying to apply to.
Many startups, when applying to grants, fall under common pitfalls such as:
Not explaining why your team is the right team to execute on the project that you working on
Not backing it up with data points
Not getting enough letters of support to show real partnership between your organization and other organizations that you're working to serve
Sometimes it's as simple as you had the wrong font size or you had too few or too many pages of text in a certain section
In Quillify's situation for the first federal grant we went after, we forgot to specify that we were going to publish our research in a peer reviewed journal, and that single mistake killed our chances. The lack of a standardized checklist across different applications for different funders makes it really difficult to keep everything straight.
The Time and Cost of Grant Applications
According to a 2018 National Small Business Association survey, small businesses spend an average of 120 hours preparing for a single federal grant application. And I think that's on the low end, based on the thousands of conversations we've had with applicants. Those statistics are highly skewed towards small businesses that throw something together overnight and hope it works. As a result, they fail. Competitive applications truly take small businesses closer to 300 hours for a single federal grant application.
But the typical startup, when they look for grants, typically apply for four to six per year. That consumes 25 to 50% of a full-time employee's work hours. And the success rate is so dismal.
Think about it: that's thousands of dollars per startup small business wasted in failed grant opportunities. You look at how many small businesses there are - 32 million in the U.S. - and how many non-profits there are in the U.S. alone. That is hundreds of millions of dollars wasted every year in failed grant applications.
AI-Powered Grant Application Transformation
Quillify's technology is designed to use AI to make the entire grant process super simple and streamlined. AI locates grants for you, alerts you when new opportunities come out, and writes the entire proposal for you.
Early Notification of Grant Opportunities
This past week, Quillify's clients got a notification that the OCAST Industry Innovation Initiative NOFO came out before the OCAST organization had publicly announced that it was indeed on their website. Quillify was there the minute they posted the NOFO, making it available on their website.
Dozens of organizations now have an extra two months to prepare their application and think about how they're going to apply to it that they may have missed otherwise. They wouldn't have heard of it until three days before the application deadline if not for Quillify.
AI-Written Grant Applications
In 2024, Quillify used its platform to write the grant for the Industry Innovation Initiative grant for $300,000. It wrote the whole grant and Quillify spent about four extra hours of fine-tuning to submit a proposal for the opportunity.
Quillify won that grant in partnership with another organization and was a recipient of $300,000 in matched funds at a 2% acceptance rate.
Personalized Grant Writing
When Quillify's AI writes the grant opportunity, it considers:
Your history
Your impact
What you do as an organization
Your key metrics
Your "about us" and mission
What impact you're having on the community
It marries it with the project in focus. One example is Quillify's 2024 OCAST grant application to work alongside universities to help startups and defense contractors get access to federal grant opportunities faster and easier. This would pull in millions of dollars of federal money into Oklahoma and create new jobs because the grants would fund jobs for other organizations and increase the number of defense contractors in the state. More federal grants = more DoD contracts = more high value jobs.
Optimized for Success
When Quillify won that grant application in conjunction with another organization, the grant had a 2% acceptance rate, which is outstanding. The Quillify AI grant writer takes the KPIs that the funder is looking for and makes sure to optimize the application on those KPIs. This way, you're speaking the grant makers', or in other words the funders', language. You're making sure that your project is aligned with the community enhancements that they're looking for, and you're doing it in a way that speaks to them, that they're used to reading about and understanding and funding.
Customized Templates
Quillify doesn't have pre-built templates. Instead, the AI goes through the requirements packet and parses out exactly what the template should look like based on the grant requirements. If there's any wiggle room there based on your specific project, it elaborates on it to give you the best scaffolding it can possibly give you.
Imagine going back through it, reading it, and editing a well-written first draft vs starting with a blank piece of paper. It's much easier to have a completely done first draft, and that's what Quillify offers.
July 2025 OCAST Grant Application Action Steps
If you're looking to apply for the 2025 OCAST Innovation Initiative grant for $500,000 in matched funding, start collecting information on projects that align with their desires. The projects should be in the defense, aviation, biotech, life science, or energy tech sectors and demonstrate how you can make an economic impact, create jobs, and bridge the public-private partnership gap.
Applying for the Grant
Applying for OCAST grants for small businesses in Oklahoma can be time-consuming, taking up to four weeks if you do it yourself. However, with Quillify, you can complete the application in just five to eight hours.
Matched Funding Requirements
The key aspect of this grant opportunity is matched funding. Before applying, ensure that you either have the matched funding available or have a partner committed to providing the matched funding you're requesting.
Here's an example: if you ask for $500,000 from OCAST, you must have $500,000 committed and provide proof of that commitment.
Application Timeline
The application opens on July 1st and closes on July 31st.
Results are expected to be announced in August.
Funded initiatives will start in October or November.
To maximize your chances of success, gather all the necessary information and secure your matched funding early. This will give you ample time to craft a compelling application that showcases your project's potential impact and alignment with OCAST's objectives.
Accelerate Your Growth with Expert Grant Support
Your next OCAST grant application can be ready in days instead of months. Our team has helped businesses secure over $2.5 million in state-level funding through proven methods and deep expertise. We know what works because we've done it ourselves - our own OCAST grant brought in $300,000 for business growth.
Schedule a call with us today to review your project and build your winning application strategy. The next funding round opens July 1st, and we're ready to guide you through each step toward success.
