News

By Elyse Ball, VP of Programming, Bounce Innovation Hub

On September 30, 2025, the federal SBIR and STTR programs lapsed. Congress didn't reauthorize them until April 13, 2026. For most of those six months, the largest source of early research money for American startups stopped putting out new solicitations at most agencies.

I worked with 2 founders - 1 in Bounce's Kinetic: Healthcare Innovation in Motion program and the other in the Synthe6 Materials Accelerator - who were directly impacted by this pause. After spending 50 to 100 hours writing 2 compelling R&D proposals to 2 federal agencies, the first founder was exasperated to see both proposals just sitting in a web portal without knowing when, or even if, the proposals would ever be reviewed. The other founder had been told of a positive funding recommendation, but with the paperwork in process when the SBIR program lapsed, he waited more than 6 months to get his promised contract and accompanying funds.

I'm not bringing this up to scare anyone off grants. The programs are back, now authorized through 2031, and grants are still some of the best money a deep tech founder can get. After all, grants are non-dilutive, patient capital that is generally designed to fund the exact kind of cutting edge translational research healthtech and advanced materials startups do. I'm bringing it up because it's the clearest illustration I know of the first rule of grant funding: a grant is one part of your funding mix, not the whole strategy.

Grants work best alongside other money

In 2025, 6 of the 22 companies in Bounce's Kinetic healthtech program received grants. Only 1 of them ran on grant money alone. The other 5 paired their grants with money from private investors.

That's the pattern I'd encourage. Grants are slow (months from submission to money in the bank), they fund the scope you wrote down months ago, and as last year showed, they can disappear for reasons that have nothing to do with you. Customers and investors fill the gaps that grants leave. If your plan only works when the next award comes through, it isn't a plan yet.

So let's talk about grants: How do you pick which ones to go after? How do you maximize your chances of winning? And what happens when reviewers sit down to read yours?

Find a grant that fits

Here's my test: if you can't explain to your mom in 2 minutes why you're going after this specific grant, it probably isn't a fit.

The 2-minute version has to connect what the grant funder wants and what your company plans to do next. "NIH funds early studies that show a device can work in patients, and that's exactly the study we need before investors will take us seriously" passes the test. "There was an open topic and the deadline was in 3 weeks" doesn't.

Grants take literally dozens of hours per proposal to write well, even for experienced grant writers (which most startup founders aren't). That's why it baffles me when otherwise logical founders will throw weeks of their life at pursuing something that doesn't really fit their business because it's "free money." A poorly fit proposal is both highly unlikely to win and risks being a major distraction to your product roadmap if you somehow win it.

That's also why pursuing other funding options, like investors and (if possible) revenue, is valuable. If grants are your only source of capital, you may be tempted to go after anything that even tangentially relates to your business. Having a variety of potential funders allows you to be more disciplined in pursuing both the most logical grant opportunities and the best fit investors.

Talk to the people who already won

This is the most underused move in grant writing, and it's free. Past winners are easy to find. SBIR.gov has a searchable database of every award, with the company name, the project abstract, and usually a contact for the principal investigator. State programs announce their winners publicly too.

Email a few of them. Founder to founder, most people are glad to help, and they'll tell you things no solicitation will: what the program manager cared about, what the reviewers pushed back on, what they'd do differently. The best people to ask are the ones who didn't win on the first try. They've read the reviewer comments on a losing proposal, and they know exactly what changed between the no and the yes.

Write for a tired reviewer

It helps to picture how grants actually get reviewed. Reviewers are generally volunteers (for state and foundation grants) or lightly compensated experts (for federal grants), who've been asked to read a stack of proposals on top of their day jobs, scoring each one against a rubric. I know this, because I've reviewed grants for the National Science Foundation.

Like most reviewers, I took my work seriously, read every page and tried to double check for items that were scored in the rubric but not readily apparent in the proposal. I'll also admit that most of my review sessions took place at 10:00pm or on a Saturday afternoon as I hid from my family in a quiet corner. It was frustrating when an applicant didn't put their thesis clearly in the opening, didn't have headings that corresponded to what I'd been asked to score, or hid their most creative idea midway through page 11.

Make it easy for your reviewers. Open with the major points and theses of your proposed project. State your most important and strongest points more than once. Use the solicitation's own headings, in the order they appear. Answer the question in the first sentence of each section, then support it. Use the funder's language, not your lab's. A question you skipped or didn't clearly answer always undermines your score, no matter how good the rest of the proposal is.

Add a little razzle dazzle

Once every question is answered, give the reviewers something to remember. People remember what stands out, and when a review panel is deliberating, reviewers flip back through the proposals looking for things they only partially remember.

I once worked with a startup founder who was also a long-time university faculty member with years of experience writing and reviewing grant proposals. He told his team that half of proposals fail because of "bad packaging." For example, 15 pages of single-spaced bare text leaves reviewers begging for a break.

Use a graphic, a table, or a short bulleted list for your strongest points instead of burying them in a paragraph. If you have a prototype, show a picture of it. If a customer said something that made you want to frame it, pull that quote into a callout box. One or two of these per section is plenty (you're writing a proposal, not a brochure). The goal is two-fold: you break up the text in a way that makes it more entertaining for a reviewer, and when a reviewer flips back looking for "the one with the great customer quote," yours jumps off the page.

Where to start looking

There are thousands of grant programs out there, but a handful account for most of the money Bounce's founders actually win.

Before you put pen to paper on your next grant

Try the 2-minute version on someone who loves you and doesn't understand your technology. If they get it, find 3 past winners of that grant and send 3 emails this week. If they don't get it, that's useful too. It means your time is better spent on an investor call than a proposal.

If you're a Bounce founder, talk to your EIR about when a grant is (or isn't) a strategic source of funding for you. Bounce also has several preferred providers that are professional grant writing consultants and offer discounts to Bounce clients. We picked them because they are the kinds of consultants that will give you an honest opinion on whether the grant is something you'll likely win or lose, as well as how to split up the grant writing work. We'd much rather help you pick the right grant than help you polish the wrong one.