The potential SBIR rewards far outweigh the challenges, and with determination, your startup could be the next success story. Photo via Getty Images

Grants are everywhere, all the time, but often seem unobtainable for startups. Most companies tell me about their competitors winning grants but don’t know how to secure non-dilutive funding for themselves. It’s true that the SBIR program is competitive — with only 10 to 15 percent of applicants receiving awards — but with a little guidance and perseverance, they are most definitely obtainable.

An SBIR overview

The Small Business Innovation Research program was introduced on the federal level in 1982 with the purpose of de-risking early technologies. While most investors are hesitant to invest in a company that’s still in ideation, the SBIR program would provide an initial level of feasibility funding to develop a prototype. The program issues funds to companies without taking any equity, IP, or asking for the money back.

Since its inception, the SBIR program has funded over 200,000 projects through 11 different federal agencies, including, but not limited to, the Department of Defense, the National Institute of Health, and the National Science Foundation. Federal agencies with R&D budgets over $100 million dedicate at least 3.2 percent of their budget to the SBIR program to fund research initiated by small businesses.

Eligibility and application process

It is no surprise that only small businesses can apply for this non-dilutive funding. For SBIR purposes, a small business is defined as being a for-profit entity, smaller than 500 employees, 51 percent owned by US citizens or permanent residents, and not primarily owned by venture capital groups. This small business must also have the rights to the IP that needs de-risking.

To apply, the small business must have a specific project that needs funding. Normally, this project will have three specific aims that detail the action items that will be attempted during the funded period. Some agencies require a pre-application, like a letter of intent (DOE) or a project pitch (NSF). Others don’t have a screening process and you can simply submit a full application at the deadline. Most agencies published examples of funded or denied applications for you to review.

SBIR phases

Phase I of the SBIR program is the normal entry point for every agency. It takes your product from ideation, through a feasibility study, to having a prototype. While agencies provide various funding amounts, the range is between $75,000 to $300,000 for 3 to 12 months of R&D activities. Applications contain a feasibility research plan (around six pages), an abstract, specific aims, supporting documents, and a budget.

While some programs allow for Direct to Phase II (D2P2) applications, most don’t apply for Phase II until they have secured Phase I funding. This second phase allows companies with completed feasibility studies to test their new prototype at a larger scale. The budgets for this phase range from $600,000 to $3 million and span an average of two years. The research plan is twice as robust and a commercialization plan is also needed.

Tips for success

If you’re wondering if your technology would be a good fit for a certain program, you can start by looking at the SBIR website to see the previously funded projects. The more recent projects will give you an idea of the funding priorities for each agency. Most abstracts will allude to the specific aims, meaning you can get a sense of the research projects that were approved. If you regularly see an agency funding projects similar to yours, you can search sbir.gov/topics for that agency’s research topics and upcoming deadlines.

Your team is one of the most important aspects of the application. Since you will be reviewed by academic experts, it’s helpful to have a principal investigator on your project that has a history of experience or publications with similar technology. Keep in mind that this principal investigator must be primarily employed by your company at the time of the grant. If this individual is employed by a university or nonprofit research organization, consider taking the STTR route so you can utilize their expertise.

Preparing Phase I applications should take no less than eight weeks, and Phase II should take at least ten. Your first step should be read the entire solicitation and create action items. The early action items should be

  1. Completing government registrations, like SAM.gov
  2. Writing your abstract and specific aims
  3. Contacting the program manager or director for early feedback

Any bids, estimates, or letters of support may also take time to receive, so don’t delay pursuing these items.

Don’t stop trying

If you speak to any program officer, they will encourage you to keep applying. For resubmissions, you will have a chance to explain why your previous application was denied and what you’ve done to improve. Most companies receive funding on the resubmission. If you get the feeling that a specific agency isn’t the right fit, reach out to other agencies that may be interested in the technology. You may realize that a small pivot may open up better opportunities.

There are frequently published webinars from different agencies that will give overviews of the specific solicitations and allow for Q&A. If you feel stuck or are still concerned about getting started, reach out to an individual or group that can provide guidance. There are plenty of grant writers, some of which have reviewed for the SBIR program for different agencies, who can provide strategy, guidance, reviews, and writing services to provide different levels of help.

Securing SBIR funding can be a game-changer for startups. While the process may seem daunting at first, with the right approach and persistence, it’s very obtainable. Remember, each application is a learning experience, and every iteration brings you closer to success. Whether you seek support from webinars, program officers, or professional grant writers, the key is to keep pushing forward. The potential rewards far outweigh the challenges, and with determination, your startup could be the next SBIR success story.

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Robert Wegner is the director of business development for Euroleader.

Comcast is looking out for the one-third of businesses in the Houston metro area that are minority-owned. Photo courtesy of comcast.

Tech company to grant funds to Houston-area BIPOC small business owners

comcast cares

Comcast, the telecom, media, and entertainment conglomerate, is awarding $1 million in grants to small businesses in Houston owned by entrepreneurs who are Black, indigenous or people of color (BIPOC).

In all, 100 grants of $10,000 each will be given to BIPOC-owned small businesses in Houston. Local businesses can apply for the grants March 1-14. Grant recipients will be announced in April and awarded in May.

"Unfortunately, many small businesses in Houston were not able to withstand the many months of suppressed revenues [amid the pandemic]. While we remain optimistic about our economic recovery, public-private partnerships will play a vital role in minimizing the disruptions that so many small businesses, specifically minority-owned businesses, are facing," says Vice Mayor Pro Tem Martha Castex-Tatum, who chairs the Houston City Council's Economic Development Committee.

The Houston grants are part of a $5 million investment fund sponsored by Comcast RISE, which launched last year to provide resources to BIPOC-owned small businesses around the country. Under this initiative, grants also will be awarded in Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia.

Studies show BIPOC-owned small businesses have been particularly hard hit by the pandemic, and recent research by JPMorgan Chase Institute found that Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Houston and Philadelphia were among the top markets for sharp declines in local spending. Additionally, the majority of applications for the marketing and technology services component of Comcast RISE are from these five cities.

To qualify for a Comcast RISE grant in Houston, a BIPOC-owned small business:

  • Must be located in either Harris County or Fort Bend County.
  • Must have been in business for at least three years.
  • Must employ no more than 25 people.

To drive outreach about the program and provide support, training, and mentorship, Comcast also has awarded more than $2 million to six Houston business groups: Houston Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, Greater Houston Black Chamber, Asian Chamber of Commerce, Greater Houston LGBT Chamber of Commerce, Houston East End Chamber, and Cámara de Empresarios Latinos de Houston.

"Small businesses have always played an integral role in Houston's growth and future," Ralph Martinez, senior vice president for Comcast's Houston region, says in a February 9 release. "In the midst of the pandemic, these entrepreneurs provided many of the services and resources that have kept our communities up and running."

About one-third of businesses in the Houston metro area are minority-owned. Among largest metros in the U.S., Houston ranks fifth for the percentage of minority-owned startups (30.45 percent).

Comcast RISE is part of a broader $100 million diversity, equity, and inclusion initiative that launched last summer. In June, Comcast NBCUniversal announced a multiyear plan to allocate $75 million in cash and $25 million worth of media over the next three years to fight injustice and inequality against any race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, or ability.

Houston startup Grant Source, which helps its clients find the right grants to apply for, has seen a surge in business amid the coronavirus shutdown. Getty Images

This Houston tech startup is helping businesses find the funds during COVID-19 crisis and beyond

Taken for granted

Since 2015, Grant Source has perfected the art of helping businesses, foundations, and organizations find and secure grant funding — and now their expertise has become vital to COVID-19 response initiatives.

With the devastation caused by the novel coronavirus, America's medical organizations have been scrambling to obtain the funds required to purchase the testing kits, masks, PPE, and other life-saving products needed to help curb the effects of the global pandemic and now, thanks to the mobile and web platform, they're getting the assistance they need to accomplish that goal.

"COVID-19 response is actually our claim to fame right now," says Allen Thornton, founder and CEO of Grant Source. "We have probably done more business in the last few months than we have since we started. Simply because we are helping people find grants with the CARES Act. There's over $500 billion out there, which has created overnight a $40 billion market opportunity for us."

Grant Source has worked extensively with city, county, state, and government agencies to secure grant funding, which is why they have become a game changer for those that need emergency capital to combat COVID-19's challenges.

"Initially, it was scary because we lost some of our clients, but then a bunch of medical clients came to us and asked if we could help them find funding for COVID-19 outreach," Thornton says. "We've found that they have a higher probability of success right now because with COVID-19 outreach, the procurement cycle has gone from six to nine months down to 30 days, which is unheard of."

In addition to telemedicine companies, Grant Source has been helping write grants for clients that range from airports to technology companies in order to help provide them with a path forward in the fight against the novel coronavirus.

Grant Source has created a database and a suite of resources for companies looking for grants. Photo via grantsource.com


Preventing federal funding waste

Outside of the context of a pandemic, the government uses grants as a way to fund ideas and projects that provide public services and stimulate the economy.

Grants are also essential when it comes to supporting critical recovery initiatives and innovative research, but on a fundamental level, very few even know how or where to start when it comes to applying for one and it becomes even more esoteric when it comes to getting funded. That's why so much grant money goes unclaimed, with millions of nonprofits and businesses going underfunded and not maximizing their impact.

"Over $3.2 billion in grant money goes unclaimed every single year," says Thornton. "We have a broken system and we wondered what we could do to change it, so we started Grant Source, our revolutionary grant funding system, to help organizations find and secure money for their mission."

Client-focused services and support

In addition to helping clients find grants, Grant Source assists with the necessary pre-work to apply for a grant.

"We started out as just a database where you could find grants and grant writers," says Thornton. "But in listening to our customers, they wanted us to do everything full service, too. So, I flew all across the country from Minneapolis to Kansas to Los Angeles to Toronto and put all the top grant writing associations on retainer and created what is Grant Source today, which is pretty much mobile for grants."

Thornton says Grant Source has more than 1,500 consultants across the U.S. and Canada, and these professionals each have different specialties — much like a lawyer or a doctor — and relationships in different states.

For a flat fee that ranges from $500 to $5,000 per month, Grant Source will set out to procure its clients grants that range anywhere from $50,000 to $1 million based on their goals. To date, Grant Source has helped businesses and organizations find and secure over $6 million in grant funding.

New clients first sign up for an assessment with Grant Source that establishes what the client's goals are and how the company is set up. Once Grant Source has established a few options for the client, they get started on submitting to the grants. In order to protect its customers from the uncertainty of the process, Grant Source offers investment protection for 12 months.

"We have the investment protection so customers won't be left empty handed," says Thornton. "It's risk free, so if they don't at least get their investment back within the first 12 months, we'll either continue their grant at no cost or we'll give them a credit for the difference."

Founded from a personal need

Treating customers with fairness is important for Grant Source because they started out as a nonprofit seeking grant funding themselves and soon learned that there was a lot that they did not know about the process.

"When I was at UTSA in 2006, the African American graduation population was less than 6 percent, which was unacceptable, so we started a nonprofit," says Thornton. "We made a lot of impact in just a few years. We increased the graduation population from 6 percent to about 38 percent, And, for the 2008 election, we were able to register over 3,200 students."

After graduation, Thornton says he saw an opportunity to expand to other colleges, but lacked funding to do so.

"We saw grants as a huge opportunity and they are, but unfortunately, they're also a huge hassle and it takes a lot of time and energy and effort to even find one that you qualify for," he remembers. "And even when you do, if you don't know how to write the proposal, you're dead in the water."

After the grant process failed, Thornton's money was gone with no communication or valid reason as to why. That frustrated him to the point where he wanted to provide coherent solutions to the problem himself.

"I spent a ton of money on education and researching top grant writing associations," says Thornton. "Most people don't know where to find grants, and there are so many different types of grants and places you can find them. For instance, we're working on a federal proposal with the federal government, there's 26 different agencies that still don't even know how to talk to each other."

Creating a lasting impact

From the outset, Grant Source started creating corporate responsibility programs and impact within a cost center for organizations that were for profit companies. They seek to put them in ideal situations to create the kind of impact that warrants grant funding.

"What we teach our clients is that you can't approach the process with the idea that you will get the grant money and then go out and create come impact," says Thornton. "You have to focus on being able to showcase the impact that you're already creating and then we can go find money for that. If you can articulate the impact of whatever you're doing is creating, we can find the person that cares about that.

In addition providing the software and platform for grant seekers, Grant Source offers a book, courses, seminars, workshops, and conferences that offer the baseline information needed to secure grant funding.

"At the end of the day, Grant Source is a technology platform that helps organizations find money for their mission," says Thornton. "We've streamlined the grant writing process and the grant finding process. At Grant Source, we don't focus on the money, we focus on the impact and then we give people a clear path to make it happen."

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This Houston neighbor is the fastest growing wealthy suburb in America

By The Numbers

The Houston-area city of Fulshear is booming like nowhere else: It's now the No. 1 fast-growing affluent suburb in the country.

Fulshear's No. 1 status was unveiled in a new GoBankingRates' study that ranked the "30 Fastest Growing Wealthy Suburbs in America" for 2025. The report examined population changes from 2018 to 2023 among cities and towns in major U.S. metro areas with populations between 25,000 and 100,000 residents. Median household income, average home value, and a "livability score" were also calculated for each locale.

Fulshear, located 34 miles west of downtown Houston, experienced the most dramatic population increase out of all 30 cities in the report. Though the suburb only has an estimated population of 42,616 residents, that number has skyrocketed 237 percent during the five-year period.

A Fulshear resident's median income is $178,398 annually, and the average value of a home in the city comes out to $521,157, the report additionally found.

Fulshear was the second fastest growing city in America in 2023. The city's growth is further reflected by the number of new apartments that were built in the area in 2024.

Texas is tops
Texas cities took the top three fastest growing U.S. suburbs for 2025, with Dallas-area cities of Celina (No. 2) and Prosper (No. 3) experiencing wildly different (yet still sky high) population changes. Celina's population ballooned 190 percent to 43,317 residents, while Prosper's grew 81 percent to an estimated 41,660 people.

Other Texas cities that earned spots in the report include Flower Mound (No. 19), Southlake (No. 27), University Park (No. 28) and Colleyville (No. 29), all in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

"The old adage that everything is bigger in Texas is true, considering the number of Lone Star State suburbs that are quickly growing in population and overall wealth," the report's author wrote.

The top 10 fastest growing wealthy suburbs in America are:

  • No. 1 – Fulshear, Texas
  • No. 2 – Celina, Texas
  • No. 3 – Prosper, Texas
  • No. 4 – Erie, Colorado
  • No. 5 – Clarksburg, Maryland
  • No. 6 – Zionsville, Indiana
  • No. 7 – Redmond, Washington
  • No. 8 – Dublin, California
  • No. 9 – Parkland, Florida
  • No. 10 – Eastvale, California
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This story originally appeared on our sister site CultureMap.com.

Rice research breakthrough paves the way for advanced disease therapies

study up

Bioengineers at Rice University have developed a “new construction kit” for building custom sense-and-respond circuits in human cells, representing a major breakthrough in the field of synthetic biology, which could "revolutionize" autoimmune disease and cancer therapeutics.

In a study published in the journal Science, the team focused on phosphorylation, a cellular process in the body in which a phosphate group is added to a protein, signaling a response. In multicellular organisms, phosphorylation-based signaling can involve a multistage, or a cascading-like effect. Rice’s team set out to show that each cycle in a cascade can be treated as an elementary unit, meaning that they can be reassembled in new configurations to form entirely novel pathways linking cellular inputs and outputs.

Previous research on using phosphorylation-based signaling for therapeutic purposes has focused on re-engineering pathways.

“This opens up the signaling circuit design space dramatically,” Caleb Bashor, assistant professor of bioengineering and biosciences and corresponding author on the study, said in a news release. “It turns out, phosphorylation cycles are not just interconnected but interconnectable … Our design strategy enabled us to engineer synthetic phosphorylation circuits that are not only highly tunable but that can also function in parallel with cells’ own processes without impacting their viability or growth rate.”

Bashor is the deputy director for the Rice Synthetic Biology Institute, which launched last year.

The Rice lab's sense-and-respond cellular circuit design is also innovative because phosphorylation occurs rapidly. Thus, the new circuits could potentially be programmed to respond to physiological events in minutes, compared to other methods, which take hours to activate.

Rice’s team successfully tested the circuits for sensitivity and their ability to respond to external signals, such as inflammatory issues. The researchers then used the framework to engineer a cellular circuit that can detect certain factors, control autoimmune flare-ups and reduce immunotherapy-associated toxicity.

“This work brings us a whole lot closer to being able to build ‘smart cells’ that can detect signs of disease and immediately release customizable treatments in response,” Xiaoyu Yang, a graduate student in the Systems, Synthetic and Physical Biology Ph.D. program at Rice who is the lead author on the study, said in a news release.

Ajo-Franklin, a professor of biosciences, bioengineering, chemical and biomolecular engineering and a Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas Scholar, added “the Bashor lab’s work vaults us forward to a new frontier — controlling mammalian cells’ immediate response to change.”

Greentown Labs names new CEO to lead pioneering climate tech incubator

Transition News

Houston and Boston climate tech incubator Greentown Labs has named Georgina Campbell Flatter as the organization’s incoming CEO.

Flatter will transition to Greentown from her role as co-founder and executive director of TomorrowNow.org, a global nonprofit that studies and connects next-generation weather and climate technologies with communities most affected by climate change.

“We are at a transformational moment in the energy transition, with an unprecedented opportunity to drive solutions in energy production, sustainability, and climate resilience,” Flatter said in a news release. “Greentown Labs is, and has always been, a home for entrepreneurs and a powerhouse of collaboration and innovation.”

Previously, Flatter worked to launch TomorrowNow out of tomorrow.io, a Boston-based AI-powered weather intelligence and satellite technology company. The organization secured millions in climate philanthropy from partners, including the Gates Foundation, which helped deliver cutting-edge climate solutions to millions of African farmers weekly.

Flatter also spent 10 years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she was a senior lecturer and led global initiatives at the intersection of technology and social impact. Her research work includes time at Langer Lab and Sun Catalytix, an MIT – ARPA-E-funded spin-out that focused on energy storage solutions inspired by natural photosynthesis. Flatter is also an Acumen Rockefeller Global Food Systems Fellow and was closely involved with Greentown Labs when it was founded in Boston in 2011, according to the release.

“It’s rare to find an individual who has impressive climate and energy expertise along with nonprofit and entrepreneurial leadership—we’re fortunate Georgie brings all of this and more to Greentown Labs,” Bobby Tudor, Greentown Labs Board Chair and Chairman of the Houston Energy Transition Initiative, said in a news release.

Flatter will collaborate with Kevin Dutt, Greentown’s Interim CEO, and also continue to serve on Greentown’s Board of Directors, which was recently announced in December and contributed to a successful $4 million funding round. She’s also slated to speak at CERAWeek next month.

“In this next chapter, I’m excited to build on our entrepreneurial roots and the strength of our ever-growing communities in Boston and Houston,” Flatter added in a news release. “Together, we will unite entrepreneurs, partners, and resources to tackle frontier challenges and scale breakthrough technologies.”

Greentown also named Naheed Malik its new chief financial officer last month. The announcements come after Greentown’s former CEO and president, Kevin Knobloch, announced that he would step down in July 2024 after less than a year in the role.

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This article originally appeared on our sister site, EnergyCapital.