Roughly 40% of the basic research conducted in the U.S. is funded through federal research grants. Many of the innovations in our world today, from the internet to AI models to cures for debilitating diseases, have been funded through the federal grant process. Many of the great companies of our time have been built on a foundation of technology developed under federal research funding.

Yet despite the obvious societal benefits of the grant funding process, there exist massive inefficiencies in the infrastructure which funds research in the U.S. Our top academic researchers spend as much as 40-50% of their time writing and managing grant proposals. This is time away from the work of actually doing the research in the lab. Institutional pressure to win grants forces researchers to pursue the agendas set by federal agencies, rather than pursuing what they may see as the most promising avenues for discovery in their field. There is little to no room for curiosity-driven research, which is the most likely path to the largest breakthroughs. Instead, our country's best researchers are trapped on a flywheel of pursuing grants, executing on a set of goals set by someone else, and then pursuing more grants.

On the industry side, research teams are commonly pulled away from research to work on SBIR or NIH grant applications. Companies who cannot afford to hire in-house grant writers must pay expensive industry consultants to assist with grant applications, with no certainty that they will even get an award.

The massive portion of time that researchers must allocate to finding and winning grants goes largely wasted in terms of research productivity. While grant writing provides some benefit in terms of forcing a structured thought process around proposed research plans, the vast majority of it goes towards more menial tasks required to assemble winning grants, along with coordination with collaborators.

As we reflected on the grants process at Inquisite, with both an inside and an external lens, we saw tremendous opportunity to streamline the process through technology. We decided that someone needed to make it happen, and that someone should be us.

Introducing our Grants Assistant

Today we are excited to announce our new Grants Assistant, our second agentic AI Assistant following our original Research Assistant. Our Grants Assistant supports both academic and industry researchers in finding, qualifying and applying to research grants:

• AI-Powered Search & Matching: Easily search opportunities and automatically receive recommendations of relevant opportunities based on your research interests.

  
  

• Simplified Opportunity Qualification: Ask questions about grants and get answers directly from full program funding announcements.

  
  

• Grant Proposal Support (Coming Soon): Pull in relevant materials, provide constructive feedback, and automatically check for compliance to avoid accidental rejection.

Our goal with our new Grants Assistant is to make it easier and quicker for researchers to find and win research funding, so they can devote more of their time to actual research. If we can reduce the time spent on grants by just 20%, it translates to an 8%+ research productivity boost, enabling us all to benefit more quickly from new innovations that protect human and environmental health and improve our quality of life.

The basic functionality of our Grant Assistant is available today in our free tier service, and more powerful features are now available to subscribers to our Individual and Lab plans. Please try out the new Assistant and share your thoughts and ideas with us.