The grant team
From $99 a month
Sharke maintains your pipeline and prepares application drafts. You review, approve and send.
See the grant team →Verification-first grant funding
Sharke finds the grants worth pursuing, keeps your pipeline current, and prepares application drafts. You approve and send.
Prefer a one-time assessment? $79. Board-ready in 48 hours.
See the decision before you spend the hours
Illustrative example ยท Not a live recommendation
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
"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
Typical pipeline target: grants sized 3% to 15% of annual contributed revenue.
Sharke sizes the pipeline to your grant goal, replaces weak fits, and keeps it current as cycles change.
Evidence comes from federal and state awards, funder pages, open RFPs and primary-source IRS filings. Application-time estimate: Professional Grant Writer. Actual time varies by application.
The Funding Gap
A $1.2 million list can still leave a $300,000 funding goal exposed. Verify what the record supports before committing staff time.
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.
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.
Choose your support
Supporting a group of nonprofits? Explore capacity-building cohorts. See all plans and scope.
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.
* 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.
Who built Sharke
Collin Brown brings experience as a strategy consultant, technology executive, and investor. He has helped major American and European companies decide where to put their time and money. That work requires putting numbers and timing behind each opportunity, testing the evidence for both, and building a plan that still holds if the largest opportunity falls through.
He built Sharke to bring that discipline to nonprofit funding: a pipeline capable of funding the mission, with each grant checked before your team commits the hours.
His grant wins span NIH, NSF, and USDA to Meta and Google, including $1M+ in federal awards. 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.
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
Questions
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.