For nonprofits counting on grants to fund the mission
Every grant is checked against eligibility, funder history, and real fit before it earns a place in your pipeline.
* 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 Sharke workflow
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.
Not ready? Measure your Funding Gap free. Five minutes. No signup.
Verify first
Give us your EIN and your grant goal. In 48 hours, a written Assessment: a decision you can act on, not a status report, every figure sourced to the public record.
See everything it returns and sample reports on the Assessment page.
How the Verified Pipeline gets built
Determine how much documented pipeline the grant goal requires.
Check current opportunities against eligibility, funder behavior, geography, and timing.
Replace weak fits with stronger opportunities and keep the pipeline current as cycles change.
A verification-first workflow with human review. Run it yourself for $159 a month, or Sharke runs it for you from $249 a month, priced by how much of your mission rides on grants. See plans and scope.
| 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 source-cited decision |
| 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.
What a verdict looks like
The Assessment answers whether the path to funding is viable. Decision Records answer whether a specific opportunity belongs in it. Three real verdicts: pursue, wait, or walk away.
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 consequence of delay
Most teams do not find out until it is too late. In 2025 the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative wound down its advocacy and housing grantmaking; organizations that had planned around renewals were told the funding would not continue. And 69% of nonprofits reported funding cuts from at least one source that year.
A verified pipeline is how a mission absorbs a funder pivot: the next path to funding is already known before it is needed. The Assessment shows whether your current plan could absorb that loss and which funders to verify before the board assumes they will be there.
Source: Center for Effective Philanthropy, A Sector in Crisis (2026); State of Nonprofits 2026.
Who built Sharke
Collin Brown has spent his career building ways to measure things people thought could only be judged by intuition. In mergers and acquisitions, his framework for measuring acquisitiveness helped companies distinguish between deals that created value and deals that destroyed it. The work is still cited in M&A research today.
In grant-seeking, he saw the same problem: organizations were making major funding decisions without a way to measure whether their pipeline had a path to the funding they needed.
Your Funding Gap is that measurement.
He has won grants at both for-profit and nonprofit organizations, from NIH, NSF, and USDA to Meta and Google, including $1M+ in federal awards, and he served in the White House Office of Management and Budget. Wharton MBA. Trained at Duke Sanford School of Public Policy. Author of "AI You Can Actually Trust" (Amazon Top 50 Business Bestseller).
Questions
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.
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 3.8 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 pipeline plans there is one promise we do make, the Funding Goal Guarantee: 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.
The hours are already being spent. The only question is whether they are going to the right grants.
See whether your pipeline can actually reach your funding goal, before the year decides for you.
Get the Grant Funding Viability Assessment →$79 one time. Board-ready in 48 hours.
Not ready for the Assessment? Measure your Funding Gap free.
Grant teams: the self-serve workspace Done for you: your grant office Capacity builders