Done for you, when your team is at capacity
Your team is at capacity, and grants still have to fund the mission.
Somewhere on your list right now is a grant with real fit for this cycle. No one has the hours to find out which one. The deadlines you meant to hit pass quietly, while you and your staff are working elsewhere. Sharke becomes your grant director: the whole grant function, run for you.
Set up your grant office →What your team cannot see yet
You cannot tell which of these grants were ever a real fit.
Even with the hours, every grant on that list would go out on a guess about whether the funder was ever a real fit. Some of them are not long shots. The funder's own record shows no documented fit at all, and right now there is no way to tell which ones.
In the grant pipelines Sharke has reviewed, about 1 in 4 had no documented fit. Staff time went into them anyway, and it was never coming back.
- Hours spent on grants that were never a fit.
- Grants pursued on a guess, not documented fit.
- Deadlines that passed before anyone looked.
- Good funders you never found.
Share of pipeline grants with no documented fit in the funder's record: based on grant pipelines reviewed by Sharke.
Why waiting is already late
Next year's funding is being decided right now.
The funders who will write checks next year are building those relationships this cycle. The programs renewing next year are reviewing who fits now. None of it waits for the moment you decide you need the money. By then the cycle is underway and the room is full.
Roughly 70% of foundations do not accept unsolicited proposals. That money goes where a funder already knows the organization. The relationship that puts you in that group forms months before the grant exists, not the week you apply. Sharke surfaces the invite-only funders worth building toward now, so the door is open before you need it. And the room is getting more crowded: 87% of foundation leaders report rising demand for the grants they give.
Federal programs freeze and priorities shift, and a grant you won before is no longer a safe bet to win again. When you need to replace that funding fast, there is no fast. The pipeline that catches the loss is the one you started before it happened. Sharke verifies whether a program is funding this cycle and whether you still fit what it funds now, before anyone spends the 50-plus hours a federal application takes.
If you wait until the grant is needed, you are already late.
Share of U.S. foundations that do not accept unsolicited proposals: Foundation Center / Candid. Rising demand: Center for Effective Philanthropy, State of Nonprofits 2026.
What Sharke does
Sharke becomes your grant office.
Sharke builds and manages a verified pipeline for you: the grant office function itself, run for you, from finding the grants with verified fit to a finished draft. Not one more thing for your team to learn and run.
- Step 1 Verifies fit before any hours go in. Eligibility, funder history, your size and geography, where you sit in the funding cycle. Every grant comes back with one verdict and the sources behind it, not a score or a percentage. Pursue Wait Move on
- Step 2 Surfaces the grants and funders worth your time. Sharke watches the funders that match your mission and surfaces better-fit grants you are not tracking, each one carrying its own verdict, plus the funder relationships worth building toward now. You add only what has verified fit, never a longer list to triage.
- Step 3 Drafts the ones you choose to pursue. Written against the funder's real requirements and grounded in your organization's own materials, not a generic template.
- Step 4 Tracks every deadline and submission. Nothing slips while you run the rest of the organization.
What a verdict looks like
A real verdict, with the sources behind it.
Illustrative example. Your verdicts are built from each funder's own documented record.
What you get
A verified pipeline that de-risks your mission's funding.
You get the output of a grant office: a pipeline where every grant has been checked for a real path, decisions you can defend to your board, and drafts ready for you to review. The funding behind your programs stops resting on grants no one verified.
You do not get another hire to manage, another salary to cover, or another system to keep running.
What this changes
Before
Grants happen when someone has a free afternoon. You find out a funder was wrong after the time is already gone.
After
Grants run on a schedule someone else keeps. You see the verdict before the work starts, and review drafts instead of writing them.
Once you have seen a pipeline run on a schedule someone else keeps, going back to grants as everyone's spare-afternoon job stops feeling like a plan.
Who built it
I have spent my career replacing gut calls with data: how the largest financial institutions set their global IT footprint, when mergers and acquisitions create value instead of destroying it, and which grants are worth winning, at for-profit and nonprofit organizations from NIH, NSF, and USDA to Meta and Google. I have done that work across the private sector and the White House Office of Management and Budget, and I sign off on every Sharke verdict myself.
Collin Brown / Wharton MBA / Founder, Sharke.ai
From a team that ran it
"What hit me was realizing how much time we were putting into grants that were never really live opportunities for us. We had a couple that looked completely reasonable on the surface, but once we dug into who the funder actually supported, it changed the conversation pretty fast. I'd rather know that before my staff disappears into another month of work."
Executive Director, Community health nonprofit, $850K budgetQuestions
Before you decide
When can we start?
Book the setup call today, and your first grants come back verified within the first week. Prefer to run it yourself? Self-serve is open on its own page: the full workspace that finds, verifies, drafts, and tracks, for $159 a month.
What if we have not identified any grants yet?
That is the common starting point. Sharke finds and qualifies the funders that back organizations like yours, so you begin from a verified shortlist instead of a blank page.
What happens when staff turn over?
Nothing stops. The average development professional stays around 16 to 18 months, and the median vacancy runs six months (CompassPoint and the Haas, Jr. Fund, UnderDeveloped). With the grant office plan, the pipeline, the verdicts, and the funder relationships live with Sharke, so a departure does not take next year's funding with it.
Is this AI, or is a person involved?
Both. Sharke does the research and drafting, and every verdict is built from documented funder filings, 990s, award history, and eligibility, not AI guesses. With the grant office plan, the Sharke team manages the work for you.
Do we have to sign a contract?
No. It is month to month, and you can cancel anytime.
Start running grants like you have an office.
Somewhere on your list right now is a deadline that closes this cycle, and a funder who will not hear from you before it does. Nothing moves until someone owns it. The median institutional grant in the public record is about $20,000: the expensive thing is not the office, it is the grants with real fit passing while no one owns them. Book the setup call, bring the grants already in motion, and your grant office starts with the pipeline you already have.
Sharke does the grant work. Your team reviews and approves. You do not hire a department, you get one.
Priced to how much of your mission rides on grants: $249 at about half, $369 at three-quarters, $459 at essentially all. Federal grants over $100k added per application.
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.
No contract. Cancel anytime.
Consultant cost: $50 to $100 an hour, mid-level (2025 to 2026), for the work an organization with about half its funding from grants takes on, roughly 1.5 applications a month at 30 hours each. Median institutional grant: public grant record (IRS Schedule I), Sharke analysis.
Not ready for the full office?
Start with the Grant Funding Viability Assessment: the funding behind your mission scored 0 to 100, the months of runway leadership actually has, the grant pipeline your funding goal would take, and named funders that already back organizations like yours. Board-ready, before staff time goes in.
Grant Funding Viability Assessment: $79A board-ready answer in 48 hours.
Get the Grant Funding Viability Assessment →You do not need to find more grants to chase.
You need an office that runs them. That is what Sharke is.