Verification-first grant funding
We find the grants worth pursuing. We screen out the ones you have no real shot at. What survives is your Verified Pipeline.
Prefer a one-time assessment? $79. Board-ready in 48 hours.
What a verdict looks like
See whether a grant belongs in your Verified Pipeline, with the evidence behind the decision. The funders shown are illustrative.
Community Resilience Fund
Family foundation · $150K to $250K · Southwest
Funder behavior, not stated focus
Stated focus: "General health."Actual pattern: 12 of the last 15 awards went to rural youth mental health organizations like yours.Your size, your geography, your issue.
Eligibility and geography: verified compatible (Southwest)
Source: IRS 990-PF Schedule I, 2021 to 2025
Pursue, Wait, or Move on, each with the evidence behind the decision. A Move on verdict is the kind a team can forward straight to a board, sourced to five years of public filings.
After a grant earns its place in the Verified Pipeline, Sharke helps draft and red-teams the application before the funder sees it.
"I've been around grants long enough to know that not every opportunity is worth pursuing, but we usually don't find that out until we're already deep into the work. The review helped us take a harder look at what was actually realistic and where we should focus our limited time. That alone made it worthwhile."
Director of Development · Workforce development nonprofit · $1.2M annual budget
The Sharke workflow
Sharke sizes the pipeline to your grant goal, replaces weak fits, and keeps it current as cycles change.
* Typical pipeline target: grants sized 3% to 15% of annual contributed revenue.
Not just the 990s everyone reads. Every verdict draws on federal and state award records, live funder pages and open RFPs, eligibility criteria, and primary-source IRS filings.
The Funding Gap
Your Funding Gap is the difference between what your mission needs from grants and what your pipeline can actually fund. Here is the math on a $300,000 grant goal.
A full-looking pipeline, and only a fraction with a real path to funding. That gap is the part no one has shown you.
Funding Gap = your grant goal minus your Verified Pipeline.
Illustrative. The free Funding Path Checkup estimates whether the current pipeline is large enough for the stated grant goal. The Assessment determines what the public record supports and what must be verified next.
A board can evaluate a documented path to funding. It is much harder to defend a plan built on grants no one verified before staff time was committed.
Before the current pipeline becomes the year's plan, verify what is behind it.
Want the verified read first? Get the $79 Assessment, board-ready in 48 hours. Not ready? Measure your Funding Gap free. Five minutes. No signup.
Before staff time goes in
A verification-first workflow with human review. The grant team, from $99 a month: you approve and send, or the grant office, from $399 a month: we submit for you, each priced by your organization. See plans and scope.
The grant team: you approve and send The grant office: we submit for you Capacity builders
| Grant search | Sharke |
|---|---|
| Finds opportunities | Verifies whether they belong |
| Matches on stated interests | Checks actual funding behavior |
| Adds to the list | Rules grants in or out |
| Leaves research to the team | Returns a decision on each grant |
| Stops at discovery | Replaces weak fits and maintains the pipeline |
The hard part is not generating a list or a draft. It is deciding what deserves staff time.
The consequence of delay
Among the nonprofits in Sharke's study, 76% received most of their reported grant dollars from a single funder. In a separate two-year comparison, 45% of funding relationships were not recorded again in the later filings.
An expiring grant leaves a hole in the budget, even when it ends exactly as planned. Sharke helps you build toward the next source of funding while the current one is still there, with grants worth pursuing now and funder relationships worth cultivating for the next cycle.
Sharke Research, The Single Funder Problem. Concentration covers 101,118 nonprofits receiving $100,000 to $5 million in itemized grants in tax year 2023, not their total revenue. The separate relationship comparison includes one-time grants. Read the findings and method.
Who built Sharke
Collin Brown helped companies decide which opportunities deserved their time and money as a strategy consultant and investor. He has also won more than $1 million in federal grants across several awards.
He built Sharke to bring those two experiences together: deciding which grants are worth pursuing, then doing the work to pursue them.
His grant wins span NIH, NSF, and USDA to Meta and Google. He served in the White House Office of Management and Budget. Wharton MBA. Trained at Duke Sanford School of Public Policy. He has also helped train advanced AI models and wrote AI You Can Actually Trust, an Amazon Top 50 business bestseller about why AI's claims need to be checked against evidence.
Questions
Sharke is a grant-verification and funding-pipeline platform for nonprofits. It measures whether grants can realistically fund your mission, checks each opportunity against the public record before staff time is committed, and builds a Verified Pipeline you can take to your board.
Your Funding Gap is the distance between what your mission needs from grants and the funding your current pipeline can realistically support. A list of possible grants can look like coverage while the real gap stays hidden. Sharke measures the actual number so you can plan against evidence, not assumption.
It is what survives verification. Sharke finds the grants worth pursuing, screens out the ones with no real shot, and what remains, each opportunity checked against eligibility, funder history, geography, and timing, becomes your Verified Pipeline: every entry backed by the public record.
Nonprofits that count on grants to fund the mission, especially executive directors and small development teams who cannot afford a full grants department and need to know, with evidence, whether the grant plan holds before staff time goes in.
The grant team, where Sharke does the work and you approve and send, starts at $99 a month, priced by your organization's size and read from your public 990. The grant office, where Sharke prepares the full package and submits it with your approval, runs $399 to $699 a month, priced to how much of your funding grants carry. Not sure yet? The Grant Funding Viability Assessment is $79 one time, board-ready in 48 hours, and the free Funding Path Checkup costs nothing.
A strong grant writer can review fit. But assembling current award history, first-time grantee patterns, budget comparables, geography, timing, and relationship requirements on every opportunity is time-consuming. Sharke makes that verification a standard step before writing begins.
No. Databases help you find opportunities. Sharke determines whether an opportunity belongs in the funding plan before staff time is committed.
No. Keep your CRM: Sharke is not one and is not asking you to move anything. What comes out of Sharke is a decision on each grant, verified against the funder's own record, and your verdicts, funders, and deadlines export whenever you want them.
A chatbot reasons from a grant's description and whatever you paste in. It has no award records, so it cannot check who a funder actually funds, at what sizes, in which states, or how often a first-time applicant gets in. Sharke's verdicts are checked against more than 6.1 million grant award records and the funder's own filings, and when the record shows no real path to funding, Sharke says Move on. A chatbot will happily keep you optimistic.
For prose, they are genuinely useful. The expensive mistake is not the writing, it is spending 20 to 30 hours writing for a grant that never had a real path to funding. Sharke verifies the grant first, helps draft only what earns a place in the Verified Pipeline, and red-teams the application against the funder's criteria, priorities, and past awards before you submit. Your voice stays yours; the weak spots get caught before a funder sees them.
Yes. Many foundations fund by invitation and relationship, not open RFPs. Sharke reads their actual giving from public filings, surfaces the ones already backing organizations like yours, and tells you which relationships are worth starting early. That is the grants-you-unlock stream in the diagram above: doors that open through relationships, not applications.
No. Sharke never predicts awards or promises wins. Verification tells you whether the documented record supports pursuing an opportunity and where the path to funding is weak, incomplete, or closed. On the grant office plan there is one promise we do make, the Funding Goal Guarantee: While your account is active, if Sharke cannot identify enough verified opportunities and funder relationships to support your funding goal, we continue working at no charge until we do.
Your EIN and one line about your organization is all it takes. Sharke works from your public filings, peer grant records, and documented funder activity. Every decision identifies the evidence used and flags what cannot be verified.
You still receive a decision path. The Assessment shows where the current plan is exposed, whether to narrow the path first, and which funders or assumptions to verify before more staff time is committed.
Sharke builds and maintains your funding pipeline and prepares the applications. You approve and send.
Start with the grant team, from $99 a month →No contract. Cancel anytime. Your workspace is live the same day.
Prefer a one-time assessment? $79. Board-ready in 48 hours. Or measure your Funding Gap free.
The grant team: you approve and send The grant office: we submit for you Capacity builders