AI + Consulting = LightningAI
At LightningAI, we employ a two-faceted strategy to create your grant applications. We provide bespoke consulting services to truly understand your organization and design a customized knowledge base. This knowledge base fuels our AI solutions to craft precise and captivating grant applications on your behalf.
Our goal is to alleviate your administrative burdens of grant applications and funding search, and enable you to concentrate on your core missions.
What We Offer
Lightning AI goes above and beyond standard results. Lightning AI employs a multi-faceted approach, combining consulting services to truely understand your organization and advanced AI tech stacks to deliver accurate, organization-specific writing that mirrors your unique style. No more generic applications!
Time Saving
A typical grant application has 5-10 paragraphs asking for 250-500 words of content, which takes most non-profit 2-4 weeks to write and edit. Therefore, in our research, we noticed that most non-profits apply to less than 5 grants a year due to time constraints. At Lightning AI, we aim to alleviate that burden and help you focus on your core missions.
Risk Mitigation
Are you concerned about dedicating 2-4 weeks to creating a grant application and not receiving funding? Many researchers and non-profits are, so they do not apply for many of the grants they are eligible for. Lightning AI helps you mitigate that risk by using AI solutions to apply for all eligible grants, ensuring a high likelihood of securing at least one.
Enhanced Awareness
There are over 30,000 grants in United States and Canada, and you may not be aware of all the grants that you are eligible for. Lightning AI leverages our exclusive AI-powered grant database to provide you with an extensive list of available grants tailored to your organization's unique needs. Say goodbye to the tedious search process!
Cost Effciency
Bid farewell to high grant writer costs. We charge fees predominantly after grant success, and our AI can handle multiple applications in the time it takes a writer to complete one. Our service fees are built into your grant application, so you don’t have to pay it upfront!
Explore our Full Package Service
LightningAI will provide an end-to-end service to search, apply, consult and fine-tune for all of the grants that you are eligible for.
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Phase 1: Project Initiation - FREE!!
We charge an upfront fee and provide the following services to kickstart the application process.
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Initial consulting engagements
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Tailored grant search (50-500 grants)
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Knowledge Base Creation
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Human Edits & Model Fine Tuning
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GenAI Technical Charge
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Grant Application (10-100 grants)
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(Pricing depends on the size of your organization, grant availability and quality of existing information)
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Phase 2: Grant Application - Flexible
We will bill you the grant application fee only once you receive the grant, which we can budget into your grants as communications support.
Alternatively, we can also bill you an hourly consulting rate for each grant applied.
The Lightning Process
01.
Project Initiation
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Search Our Grant Databases
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Build your customized Knowledge Base
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Train AI Model and Generate Application
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Review, Edit and Model Fine-Tune
Receive and review a package of reference materials. Then conduct a 30-60 minute interview with you to fully understand your organization.
Use our AI solution to search among the 30,000+ grants in the US and Canada. Generate a customized list of grants that you are eligible for.
Based on the initiation consulting interview style meetings and the materials you sent us, we will tailor-make a knowledge base for your organization.
Train AI model to write in a style and specificity that mathces your organization. Then genreate grant applications.
Edit and review the generated results. Add completed grant applications back into the AI model as examples for your next grant.
Our Client Story:
University of British Columbia
UBC Institute for Veterans Education and Transition (IVET) is a UBC office dedicated to supporting Veterans in their journey from military service to post-secondary education and civilian life. IVET found itself with the incredibly impactful yet demanding role of supporting over 300 Veterans on the UBC campus. The office requires a significant budget and constantly searches and applies for grants. It takes IVET, on average, 3-5 weeks to complete an application cycle and also leaves many potential grants untouched due to time constraints. LightningAI came in to build a comprehensive grant database and knowledge base for IVET and has collaboratively created 10 high-quality grant applications within 3 weeks. The AI model is so fine-tuned for IVET that the IVET executive director only had to spend 10 minutes reviewing each grant and made zero to minimal edits. LightningAI was also able to bring up new perspectives and insights that might have been missed by a human writer.
About Us
Our startup venture is driven by a deep and personal understanding of the challenges many non-profit organizations face. We envision leveraging generative AI and LLMs and consulting problem-solving approaches to address and solve this problem. We recognize that many researchers and non-profits have exceptional initiatives and pragmatic programs to create positive impacts in their communities. Still, they often need help to scale up their services due to budget constraints.
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Jeffrey and Bowen have profound first-hand experience with these challenges at their non-profit community, BOLT UBC. Jeffrey and Bowen co-founded BOLT in 2020 with the vision to bring business and data analytics knowledge to students from all backgrounds. Soon after founding the club, the pair noticed a significant challenge - Budget.
Co-Founder - Jeffrey Peng
We hope to make our events free or as cheap as possible to make them accessible to the greatest number of students. However, at the same time, the transition from Zoom events in 2020 to in-person events in 2021 has made it expensive with the addition of food and some venue-related costs. Our team had to dedicate significant time to grant applications to maintain the same quality of events. The time spent on grant applications has taken away from us the previous time that we can spent on our core competencies - bettering the quality of events and expanding our sphere of influence to more students. Therefore, since 2021, we have contemplated a more efficient grant application method. Today, the opportunity has finally ripened.
We built an AI-driven solution that automates the grant application process at scale. By compiling relevant grants and generating tailored applications, we will alleviate administrative burdens for non-profits. Clients can focus on community impact while we unlock funding potential. Ultimately, we want to be a one-stop shop for researchers and non-profit organizations to apply for all eligible grants and achieve their full impact potential!
Co-Founder - Bowen Zhang