Build the funding pipeline that funds the mission
Here is the math on a $300,000 grant goal.
A full-looking pipeline, and only a fraction with a real path. That gap is the part no one has shown you.
Illustrative. Your own numbers are computed when you run the free Funding Path Checkup.
Every verdict is built from documented funder behavior, eligibility criteria, award history, and primary-source 990 records. Not AI guesses.
Where to start
Your mission already has commitments attached to it: programs, staff, communities, promises made to your board. By the time the gap between those promises and what your pipeline can fund is obvious, the year is usually over. The free Funding Path Checkup shows it in five minutes. No account, nothing leaves your browser.
The Checkup measures the size and shape of your pipeline. The Verified Pipeline reviews the grants inside it: a verdict on each, with stronger opportunities to replace the ones that do not belong.
What a verdict looks like
This is what builds a verified pipeline. Two real verdicts: one to pursue, one to walk away from.
A verdict is categorical, never a percentage and never an A grade. The Move on record above is the kind a team can forward straight to a board.
"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
What that gap is
Your paper pipeline is every grant you are tracking. Your Verified Pipeline is how much of it has a documented path to funding. The drop between the two is the number that actually decides your year.
Illustrative. Foundations fund 15 to 30% of applications, so 70% or more never get funded, and most fail on gates visible in advance. Source: GrantWatch (2025).
The point is not learning where the gap is. It is seeing exactly what closes it.
The pipeline you have
Every one of these starts the same way: "We thought it was a fit."
Most rejected applications fail before a reviewer reads them: an eligibility gate, the funder's award history, cycle status, a relationship the team never had.
The grants that fund are the only ones that produce cash. The rest consumed the hours that would have produced cash somewhere else. Both halves of that stay invisible until the year is gone.
A board can understand a documented path. It cannot understand why staff spent 25 hours on a grant that never had a path to funding.
"We knew we needed more funding. What we didn't know was whether the grants we were counting on were actually going to get us there. Looking at them one by one changed my confidence level pretty quickly. A few weren't nearly as strong as we thought, and I'd rather know that before my team spends another month chasing them."
Executive Director · Texas youth mental health nonprofit · $950K annual budget
The question every board eventually asks
You cannot control whether your largest funders change priorities. You can control whether the funding that comes next is already being built.
This is not hypothetical. In 2025 the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative wound down its social advocacy, racial equity, and housing grantmaking to refocus on science, and longtime grantees who had planned around renewals were told the funding would not continue. Across the sector, 69% of nonprofits reported funding cuts that year from at least one source: government, foundation, or individual giving.
A verified pipeline is how a mission absorbs a funder pivot: the next path is already known before it is needed.
Why AI does not close the gap
AI raises the number you can see. It cannot raise the number that funds you.
AI matches on topic, not on whether you qualify. When it cannot find something, it fills the blank instead of flagging the gap. Four ways that shows up in a real pipeline:
AI surfaces a grant from 2023 and presents it as current. The deadline belongs to a cycle that closed two years ago.
Your nonprofit does after-school coding. A foundation funds youth technology. AI calls it a 95% match. What it missed: a $5M minimum budget, one county only.
The website says they support hunger relief, so AI says apply. The 990 shows no new grantee in six years.
It is the Smith Arts Foundation, so AI assumes they fund all arts. The reality: Baroque opera in New Jersey.
The hard part of grant work is not the writing. It is knowing which grants are worth your team's hours, and which to walk away from, before the hours go in.
That is the difference between one more AI tool to run, and the team that runs it for you.
How the Verified Pipeline gets built
Your funding goal is your number. Most applications do not convert and not every grant renews, so a viable pipeline runs several times larger than the wins it produces: four wins a year can take twenty applications across a dozen funder relationships. Sharke sizes that pipeline for organizations like yours. A range, never a promise.
Source-cited across eligibility, funder behavior, timing, and relationship requirements. Categorical, never a score. The grants with no path leave the list before staff time goes in.
Sharke surfaces better-fit grants you may not be tracking, starting from funders that have already backed organizations like yours, more than once, in the public grant record. Each carries a verdict, so you add only grants with a documented path.
As cycles turn and funder priorities shift, your Verified Pipeline stays live. Sharke also surfaces the relationships worth building now, including invite-only funders, so next cycle does not start from zero.
Two things move your Verified Pipeline: the grants worth pursuing, and the funder relationships worth building now. Sharke tracks both and keeps it current.
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).
Find your path
Give them the leverage of a team. Sharke does the finding and verifying, so their hours go to grants with a documented path, not dead ends, and the pipeline stays current instead of living in one person's head.
See Sharke as your grant team →Sharke becomes your grant director: finding, qualifying, and drafting the pipeline, run for you.
See Sharke as your grant director →Build the one capacity that keeps a mission going: the capacity to keep it funded when a major grant ends.
See how this builds long-term viability →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.
Find your funding gap →Free. No signup. About five minutes.