To build out Government Grants support on Streamline, we partnered with Noya, Perennial, and Vesta for the last month. As we gear up to launch publicly, we wanted to share a bit about our process.

Since our earliest prototype, Vesta has been a key design partner — Stephanie was one of our first ever writers, using Streamline when it could only support philanthropic grants, awards, and accelerators.

About a month into collaborating, our cofounder and CTO, Doug, happened to be in NYC and met up in person to do a deeper user interview. Unlike other sessions where Doug asks a series of questions, Stephanie came to the meeting with pages of feedback. Every interaction has felt equally as special and we’re grateful to collaborate so closely to get Streamline into everyone’s hands.

More recently, we’ve been working closely with Alice to launch our government grants product. Alice has similarly gone out of her way to help us build the best possible tool, specifically by inspiring the Strength Assessment feature. More on this below - but first, a bit about Vesta.

About Vesta

Vesta fights climate change by sequestering CO2 in seawater with an entirely nature-based solution: Vesta accelerates how our planet has naturally been sequestering CO2 over geological time. They add carbon-removing sand (ground up olivine) to coastal systems, which generates new alkalinity: reducing harmful ocean acidity and storing carbon dioxide permanently.

Since the beginning, Vesta has been a very science and R&D heavy startup. They have more PhDs and scientists than any seed stage startup I’ve come across, and they are actively pushing the field forward with public research (more here).

As you can imagine, all of this research has required significant funding. If Vesta had raised only venture capital, they would be entirely diluted by now. Grants were and continue to be a priority.

The design process

When we began working with Alice, Vesta's full-time grant writer, we asked about her workflow. What stood out was the slow process of ensuring requirements, recommendations, and intent of her draft aligned with the original funding announcement.

Time spent here is justified as the top reason for grant rejection is not following instructions, followed by misalignment between the proposal and grant intent.

Alice’s current solution involves creating two tables - a compliance matrix and a review matrix. The compliance matrix categorizes each mention of “must,” “should”, “may”, etc, and the review matrix includes the actual review criteria. Both tables are built out of the original proposal, and both are necessary for a successful proposal.

For the NSF SBIR the end result looked like this:

These matrixes are then used side by side in drafting the application, and also at the end in reviewing. Alice explains:

"As part of my my ideal proposal process, you would have someone doing a thorough review of your review criteria matrix. And actually writing out, yes, we met these in this way, and that seems sufficient."

Building the Strength Assessment feature

Until recently, building a programmatic solution to accelerate Alice’s process was impossible. With recent breakthroughs in AI and language models, however, we can deduce meaning, intent, and matches semantically rather than with key-word-search. At Streamline, we’re leveraging the latest AI research and providing instant assessment about the review criteria directly in our editor.

We can now support grant writers in navigating grant review criteria more elegantly, skipping manual parsing work entirely. Given a funding announcement, its associated webinars, and other content, we create the criteria. We then go a step further, auto-grading the draft.

In Streamline’s “Strength Assessment”, writers see:

1. Where the requirement was sourced from (link to FOA, webinar, or other source)

2. If you are meeting the requirement

3. (if applicable) The excerpt(s) where it’s met and how it’s been met

Here's a sneak peak of what it looks like in the editor:

What’s next for the Strength Assessment?

We won’t launch it publicly until the rest of our editor is ready, but if you’d like to try it in isolation in advance of our launch, grab a time with me here.

Down the line, a related feature we’re building is for budgetary compliance — we’ll plan to launch that when we launch integrated budgetary planning.

—

In the next few weeks, we’ll continue to diving deeper about how we build product and what’s to come. Stay tuned for how Noya inspired grants management, and how Perennial helped us build for collaboration.