Standup, part of Growth Engine Inc., today launched a new solution using natural language programming and artificial intelligence to streamline and accelerate the government grant response process for startups and small businesses.
The solution – Standup Proposals – uses artificial intelligence to reduce the often time-consuming process of drafting and submitting proposals for government grants and contracts from weeks to a process that can be implemented in an afternoon.
“Any company that has developed a proposal for federal contracts or grants for small business innovation research knows how tedious and time-consuming the process can be,” said Alan Harris, CEO and co-founder of Standup. “With Standup Proposals, we’re looking to make this mission-critical aspect of a business easier, faster, and drive more successful outcomes. By providing Standup Proposals, companies can streamline and reduce the time it takes to draft proposals, giving more time to focus on.” focused on building their business and providing better customer service.”
The recent collapse of Silicon Valley Bank is expected to have a long-lasting impact on the startup ecosystem. Many startups are turning to alternative sources of funding, including the federal SBIR program, which provides more than $3 billion in basic funding to startups and small businesses annually.
In addition to serving as a reliable source of funding, the SBIR program has the added benefit of helping startups acquire ongoing federal customers.
Using standup suggestions is easy. The user uploads the SBIR grant or RFP to the system, which uses AI and NLP to implement a sophisticated matching system to create a proposal that matches the company’s stored content and RFP requirements.
Standup developed its AI infrastructure in partnership with AFWERX, the innovation arm of the U.S. Department of the Air Force, developed and supported by the Air Force Research Laboratory, and the data matching is extremely accurate for defense industry opportunities. The system allows companies to customize responses to ensure accuracy and the ability to demonstrate specific differentiators for the RFP.
Over time, as the intelligence continues to be refined, the system learns from the company’s responses, and most importantly, from successful suggestions.
Standup Proposals was developed through Growth Engine’s founders’ experience in applying for and securing $2.3 million in SBIR awards from the Air Force.
“Companies can spend more than 30 hours and up to nine people creating proposals in response to a federal RFP. When we started using our generative AI to automate our own SBIR efforts, it was amazing how quickly we could create highly accurate proposal designs and track opportunities,” Harris said. “As we grew, we knew we could bring this tool to others in our Industry had to provide. While large companies often have large teams to respond to RFPs, startups, and small businesses don’t.”
The Standup team continues to innovate to refine the platform and recently integrated APIs from OpenAI, developers of the generative artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT, to complement Standup’s Department of Defense AI models and provide a robust solution for providing an offer.
