Small businesses and startups
Money that does not cost you equity
Grants, contracts and below-market lending are all capital you keep the company for. The reason more founders do not chase them is not that the money is hidden. It is that the process is procedurally hostile in ways nobody tells you until you are inside it.
Start with the thing that will cost you a deadline
You cannot apply for federal money without a UEI and an active SAM.gov registration, and getting one takes weeks. Not days. Entity validation can stall on a mismatch between your legal name and what the IRS or your state has on file, and there is no expedite path worth relying on.
Almost every founder learns this the same way: by finding a solicitation that closes on Friday. If you take one thing from this page, take that one, and go and start the registration before you need it. Here is what the process actually involves.
Four kinds of money, and one of them is debt
These get lumped together as “funding” and they behave nothing alike. Knowing which one you are looking at changes what you should do next.
- Grants, including SBIR and STTR
- 3,700+ open, federal, state and private. SBIR is the one most technical founders should look at first: it funds research and development at companies, not universities, it is non-dilutive, and Phase I is small enough to be winnable without a track record. An SBIR takes our clients about five hours from go decision to submission. One customer had been spending 200 to 250 hours on each of them.
- Government contracts
- 9,000+ currently open from SAM.gov nationwide plus the state procurement portals we ingest directly, 33,000+ tracked in total, searchable by set-aside, industry or solicitation number. Selling a service to a government agency is a different game from asking for a grant, and it is the one most grant tools do not play at all.
- Somebody else’s grant, which is the least contested route of all
- You do not have to be eligible for a grant to be paid out of one. Nonprofits, universities and cities win funding and then buy equipment, software, construction and services to do the work, and those purchases are line items in the proposal budget. Two of the four wins on our customers page came this way, including $1.2M across 26 proposals from a company that never filed one. How the budget-line funding works.
- Foundation funding, which is open to you more often than you are told
- Usually assumed to be closed to companies, and it is not. A foundation reaches a company through a program-related investment, a recoverable grant, or a grant it takes on extra compliance to make. 1,543 of the 122,390 foundations on file reported such an investment on their latest return, and 262 of those also accept applications, which is a shortlist most founders never see because no other tool in this category surfaces it. The numbers, and why the median one is small.
- Community lenders and patient capital
- 480+ community development financial institutions, which lend below market. Foundations also make loans, guarantees and equity investments. This is debt, so it is a different decision, and sometimes it is the right one when a grant is the wrong instrument for what you need.
Then find out if you qualify before you commit a month
The expensive mistake is not losing. It is spending three weeks on a solicitation you were never eligible for because the eligibility section was on page 41 and written in the passive voice.
Every opportunity carries an “Am I qualified?” action that reads the real announcement, not a portal summary, and tells you where you stand. If the announcement gives it nothing readable, you get the credits back.
For the ones you do pursue, the writer handles solicitations at full length, including the 200-page federal ones, and produces a compliance checklist naming what your team must produce itself. For a five-person company that list is the plan.
Two customers worth reading about
A Tulsa drone manufacturer put together an internship-grant application in about five minutes and won $6,000 from the Oklahoma Department of Aerospace and Aeronautics, inside a two-week window. Small money, and it is the kind of small money that usually goes unclaimed because it is not worth the paperwork.
An additive manufacturing company found a state semiconductor fund it had not known existed and won $5M from it. Both stories, funders included.
What Quillify hands you at submission
Grants, federal and state contracts and community lenders in one search, filtered to what your company is eligible for.
An “Am I qualified?” answer read off the real announcement, so you know before you commit a month.
A finished draft of solicitations at full length, including the 200-page federal ones, with a compliance checklist naming what your team still has to produce. For a five-person company that list is the plan.
SAM.gov registration is free and you do it yourself. Be suspicious of anyone charging you for it, and start it before you need it.
Has anyone actually done this?
A 3D printing manufacturer won $5M from a state semiconductor program, after finding it among several funders worth approaching that they had not known existed.
See what you are eligible for before you spend a week on it.
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