AI-Powered Grant Application Platform
A grant-finding, matching, writing, and management SaaS platform that puts expert-level grant support within reach of any organisation - helping under-resourced communities win the funding they deserve.
| Client | Rural Prosperity Partners |
|---|---|
| UN SDGs | 01 No Poverty 10 Reduced Inequalities 11 Sustainable Cities And Communities |
| Impact | United States of America |
| Technologies | NextJS, Payload, AWS, AI, API |
01 Introduction
Rural Prosperity Partners is a US grant-consulting firm that has spent more than 25 years helping under-resourced and rural communities secure funding, raising over $75 million for clients across the country. Over those years they noticed a clear pattern: organisations doing important work were missing out on grants - not because they didn't qualify, but because they lacked the time, staff, or specialist expertise to compete.
They came to us with an idea they'd been holding for over two years: Grant Pilot, a SaaS platform that handles the full grant lifecycle - finding the right opportunities, matching organisations to them, helping write stronger applications, and managing every award in one place. The goal was to take the expert-level support Rural Prosperity Partners had always offered as consultants and make it available to any organisation, whatever its size or budget.
02 The Project
Part of our process is to prove an idea before committing to a full build. For Grant Pilot, we created a working prototype - a live grant-finding tool hooked up to a public funding API - so the team could see real opportunities being surfaced rather than a static mockup. The demonstration made the concept tangible, and it was instrumental in securing the project and moving it from a long-held idea into active development.
From there, we designed and built the platform from scratch. The design was led by our design partner, Luminous Industries, with whom we've now collaborated on five projects and who handle the design across our work. Together we shaped a product that needed to feel simple and approachable for organisations without any dedicated grant-writing expertise, while doing some genuinely sophisticated work under the surface.
Grant Pilot covers four core areas:
- Smart discovery - surfacing relevant federal, state, and private opportunities matched to an organisation's mission and capacity, so every result is worth the user's time.
- Match scoring - measuring eligibility and mission alignment before an organisation invests effort in an application.
- AI writing assistant - giving real-time, grounded guidance as users write, so applications are stronger without starting from a blank page.
- Award management - tracking the full pipeline from first discovery through to awarded grant, replacing the usual sprawl of spreadsheets.
Around these sit the things that make it work as a real product: tiered subscriptions handled through Stripe, and team support with roles and permissions, so whole teams can collaborate on applications with the right access for each member.
The hardest problems were not on the surface. Three stood out. The first was the data - reliably sourcing and structuring grant opportunities from a fragmented funding landscape so that what users search is accurate and current. The second was search itself: using AI to power genuinely useful matching, rather than bolting on a chatbot. The third was efficiency - using AI and database resources carefully to keep token costs down and energy use low, so the platform stays both affordable and responsible at scale. How we solved these is where much of Grant Pilot's competitive advantage now sits.
The platform is built on a modern stack - Next.js and Payload, hosted on AWS - combined with a carefully chosen set of third-party APIs and AI services working behind the scenes.
Throughout, we built using the Velocity Coding methodology from our sister company GroundCtrl, a future technologies lab focused on AI. The approach pairs AI with skilled, experienced developers - letting AI accelerate the work while seasoned engineers drive the decisions - so we could deliver more features, faster, without trading away quality or maintainability.
The Grant Pilot dashboard gives users a personalised starting point, with quick paths into the areas they use most. From here they can search the grant catalogue by topic, funder, or location, review their potential matches at a glance, and move through every stage - from finding opportunities to writing applications and managing awards - via the sidebar.
Search results are presented as clear, scannable cards, each summarising a grant's funder, location, deadline, award range, and focus area. Active search terms appear as removable tags at the top, and users can bookmark promising opportunities, dismiss irrelevant ones, or open any grant for full details.
The opportunity detail page brings everything users need to assess a grant into one view. Headline cards summarise the AI-generated match score, award range, deadline, and geographic focus, while tabs organise the overview, full details, and timeline. A description and eligibility checklist sit alongside quick actions to visit the funder's site or download guidelines.
03 Conclusion
Grant Pilot moves from a free beta - currently with around 150 testers - to a public launch in July. It arrives priced to be genuinely accessible, sitting well below the full-lifecycle tools it competes with, so that organisations can comfortably move across from platforms that were never built with their budgets in mind.
The prototype-first approach proved its worth: a working demonstration turned a two-year-old idea into a funded, fully built product. With a US-wide launch first, and plans to expand into Spain, the UK, and Canada, Grant Pilot is set to help communities secure the funding they need - and put the kind of support that was once reserved for well-resourced organisations into far more hands.
The next phase of our work will bring Grant Pilot's marketing site into the same Payload CMS as the platform itself, giving the team a single place to manage everything and making the most of the foundations we've built.
04 Testimonial
"AndAnotherDay have been amazing partners to develop our website and our software application. The team is highly talented."
Rachael Maddock-Hughes,
Founder Rural Prosperity Partners/Grant Pilot