Problem
Researchers and sponsored-research teams spend substantial time navigating changing funding opportunities, identifying collaborators, and locating institution-specific guidance.
Context
GrantsMate is a startup building AI tools for grant discovery and research administration. Its public platform presents collaborator matching, funding opportunity matching, collaboration-network visualization, and a GrantsGuide knowledge experience.
My role
I am the CTO and sole developer, responsible for translating the product vision into the working software platform.
Constraints
- Funding data and sponsor requirements change continuously.
- Recommendations must reflect researchers’ experience and research focus.
- Institutional knowledge needs clear access controls and maintainable content.
TODO_REVIEW: Add the approved startup timeline, customer scope, and public infrastructure details.
Architecture
The platform combines researcher and publication context, funding-opportunity data, matching workflows, and user-facing discovery and administration tools.
TODO_REVIEW: Add an approved architecture diagram and exact production stack.
Technical decisions
- Designed product workflows around natural-language research intent.
- Built recommendation experiences for opportunities and collaborators.
- Connected research profiles, publication evidence, and funding context.
- Developed the product as an end-to-end full-stack system.
Trade-offs
TODO_REVIEW: Document retrieval freshness, ranking quality, latency, data
licensing, model routing, and institutional customization trade-offs.
Results
The live product supports funding discovery, collaborator exploration, and research-administration workflows.
TODO_REVIEW: Add approved adoption or quality metrics only when they can be
verified publicly.
Screenshots
TODO_REVIEW: Add approved product screenshots through the CMS.