Combatting global challenges by connecting clients to funding
GrantMatch Corp. announces a new Funding Assessment Scoring Tool (FAST) that will allow organizations in the US to determine whether their company, or specific project, has the potential to qualify for government funding. FAST works much like a personal credit score does to quickly determine a company’s ability to attract funding.
The new FAST is fully integrated within the larger GrantMatch™ Funding Platform, a proprietary database that enables the GrantMatch team, and their clients, to research and identify funding from a wide variety of sources; tracking more than 4,500 government programs, including grants, loans, sales tax recovery, tax credits, and corporate incentives. The platform allows users to develop a proactive funding strategy and follow the application’s progress through all stages; from identification to compliance. GrantMatch™ also features a Historical Approvals component that allows companies to compare their performance against the database of 1.6M historical funding approvals, representing over $3.3 trillion in funding dollars. In short, the GrantMatch™ platform reduces the significant friction embedded within the government bureaucracy of providing incentives to businesses.
Managing Partner Dan Civiero explains, “When COVID hit, we wanted to pitch-in as much as we could. We can’t make PPE, but we can help firms access funding in order to stay afloat. So, we decided that our services would be free of charge for the first few months. We also waived our licensing fee for the GrantMatchTM software. The development of FAST is the next step in this process. Now, any firm can quickly and freely assess whether their company, or project, has the potential to be funded”.
Dan founded the firm in 1994. At that time, the focus was on tax recovery. As the market progressed, grants and incentives became a bigger part of the business. This was solidified in 2015 with the purchase of Onager Solutions, a grant consulting firm, and the brainchild of Dan’s Partner, Mike Janke.
Says Mike, “I applied for my first grant, Summer Company, at age 17 and succeeded in getting new bindings and a board for my wakeboarding passion, and I was hooked. After graduating from the University of Waterloo in Economics, I researched the industry and realized there were very few firms specializing in government incentives. There was a real need for expertise in the area.” Mike bet on himself by offering to work on a performance-based fee structure, where Onager was only paid if a grant was secured. This proved to be a successful model as it eliminated the risk of companies paying large hourly fees for applications that could be declined. GrantMatch continues to stand by this credo and assumes 100% of the ‘approval risk’ of its filings.
The consolidation of these two entrepreneurs’ firms in 2015 created the largest government incentives consulting firm in Canada. It was not long before Mike’s vision of a software platform, GrantMatchTM, that contained all grant programs, historical approvals, and current funding news items, was born. With assistance from a prominent Canadian innovation funding program beginning in 2018, the firm was able to accelerate the development of the GrantMatchTM platform for release to its clients. This industry-leading software is the backbone of the firm’s operations and supersedes anything offered in the industry. The marriage of this platform with the expertise of the GrantMatch Funding Team is a unique service offering in the industry.
The company continues to expand from its Head Office in Oakville, ON with an additional satellite location in Chicago, Illinois. With a proven, winning business model in Canada, and a proprietary software platform, GrantMatch continues to grow. “We’ve had great success in working on projects in the US for our Canadian clients, so it’s an easy decision to further expand our business into that market” says Dan.
By leveraging their industry leading software platform, GrantMatch is poised for future success.
