Building a grant funding map instead of chasing one grant

What was broken

Evoxia Labs, a DeepTech startup, needed structured access to the grant ecosystem it was eligible for — knowing which programmes fit, and getting applications right.

What we did

CapEasy mapped 10+ grant programmes against Evoxia’s profile and shortlisted the 5+ with the strongest fit, then managed the applications and documentation end to end — including a public seed fund programme, structured as a grant or convertible debt, never both.

Where it landed

Evoxia Labs secured 5+ of the 10+ programmes mapped, including a public seed fund programme.

The US equivalent of "10+ programmes mapped" is an agency list, not one portal

SBIR.gov lists eleven federal agencies that run their own SBIR and/or STTR programmes under one statutory framework but separate solicitations, separate topics and separate reviewers: USDA, Commerce, the Department of War (DoD, including the Air Force’s AFWERX, the Navy, the Army, Space Force’s SpaceWERX, DARPA and other components), Energy (DOE), Education, Health and Human Services (which runs NIH’s SBIR/STTR programme), Homeland Security, Transportation, EPA, NASA and NSF. A DeepTech company’s actual funding map is built the same way Evoxia’s was — by profiling the technology against each agency’s mission and topic list, not by picking the one everyone has heard of.

For a company working in, say, autonomous systems, advanced materials or quantum sensing, that map plausibly spans DOE’s Office of Technology Commercialization (advanced manufacturing, quantum information science, semiconductors and critical materials are named as FY2026 topic areas, including a July 2026 Genesis Mission Phase I opportunity), NSF’s America’s Seed Fund, NASA SBIR, and the Air Force’s AFWERX or DARPA if the technology has a defence-relevant application. Grants.gov sits underneath all of it as the government-wide search index — filterable by agency, eligibility and category — for the non-SBIR grant and cooperative-agreement opportunities that sit alongside the SBIR/STTR calendar.

Sequencing: which topic, which phase, which door — decided before the file is written

Each agency’s SBIR/STTR programme runs Phase I (feasibility), Phase II (development) and Phase III (commercialisation, without further SBIR money) against agency-set ceilings — SBIR.gov currently states an inflation-adjusted Phase I guideline near $323,090 and a Phase II guideline near $2,153,927, with awards above those figures needing an SBA waiver. AFWERX additionally runs a Direct-to-Phase-II track for companies that can show prior Phase-I-equivalent progress, skipping the feasibility round entirely — a sequencing decision that only makes sense once the underlying technology and its evidence base are mapped against what each solicitation actually wants.

The discipline the engagement applied — shortlisting 5+ of 10+ mapped programmes rather than firing off ten thin applications — is the same discipline a US pipeline needs: rank the mapped agencies by topic fit and readiness level, decide which Phase I windows to enter this cycle versus next, and hold the rest until the technology or the evidence catches up. A funding map with ten rows and one live application is not wasted work; it is a roadmap for the next eighteen months of solicitation cycles.

One reconciled cost base has to serve every budget you submit

Running several applications off the same technology means several agencies will each read a different budget built from the same underlying costs — and they read it as a reconciliation, not a pitch number. NSF’s own America’s Seed Fund budget guidance publishes a sample Budget Justification template and, since solicitation NSF 24-579, requires every Phase I budget to carry specific line items tied to actual costs — up to $6,500 for Technical and Business Assistance (TABA) and $25,000 for National I-Corps training — the kind of solicitation-specific detail that only comes out clean when the underlying cost base is already reconciled, not assembled per application.

SBIR.gov’s own accounting-system tutorial is explicit about what "adequate" means in practice: direct costs segregated from indirect, costs accumulated by contract under general-ledger control, a consistent indirect-rate allocation method, and — the single most-checked item — a timekeeping system where every employee, including the founder, logs actual daily hours against the specific project rather than an after-the-fact estimate. Many SBIR/STTR agencies rely on a Defense Contract Audit Agency pre-award survey against the SF1408 checklist to test exactly that before releasing Phase II money. One clean job-costed ledger, reconciled monthly, is what lets a founder answer five different agencies’ budget questions from the same file instead of reconstructing labor allocations five separate times under five separate deadlines — which is precisely the discipline that turned Evoxia’s ten mapped programmes into five secured ones.