Agent-verified grant intelligence for Austin’s clean-energy nonprofits.
SUMMARY
Problem: Open grant data goes stale the day it’s published. The Open Grant Data MCP (756k funders, 95k grants, June-2026 snapshot) missed a $100k renewal and pushed a geographically ineligible funder at “strong confidence.” Nonprofits hand-verify funder websites or apply blind.
Solution: A Databricks lakehouse behind the MCP for continuous refresh + entity resolution; admin agents that browse funder sites and stamp every fact with a source URL and verified-as-of date; then a customer-facing grant-assistant agent for nonprofits.
Financial impact: One verified pipeline for one nonprofit (Solar Austin) surfaced $160k-$320k in eligible asks across 5 funders. One missed LOI deadline costs a 6-12 month funding cycle.
Who Pays: grant consultants and CSR teams; civic/philanthropy-tech sponsorship.
Stakeholders: Austin clean-energy nonprofits (Solar Austin, TXSES chapters), Texas funders (Meadows, Hershey, Mitchell), low-income communities served by funded programs, City of Austin / Austin Energy.
PROBLEM
Grant data can’t be trusted at decision time. In a real funder search for Solar Austin (July 2026), the best open dataset missed Meadows Foundation’s $100,000 2025 grant to Solar Austin; recommended Communities Foundation of Texas at “strong confidence” though its competitive grants exclude Travis County; and surfaced a Hershey Foundation lead one day after its Fall-2026 LOI deadline had passed.
Verification is manual. Every fact (eligibility, deadline, portal, contact) had to be re-checked by a human driving a browser across funder websites. Hours per funder, repeated by every nonprofit, every cycle.
Impact on Austin:
Citizens – low-income households lose solar education and resilient-power programs when nonprofits miss funding cycles.
Businesses – local solar installers lose community-project pipeline; funders waste staff time on ineligible applications.
Institutions – nonprofits under ~$500k budgets can’t afford grant consultants; the orgs that most need funding are worst equipped to find it.
SOLUTION
Phase 1 – Lakehouse under the MCP (Databricks or similar). Bronze: raw IRS 990s, funder-site crawls, grant listings. Silver: entity-resolved funders and grants (“Texas Solar Energy Inc” resolves to Texas Solar Energy Society). Gold: the MCP serving layer, where every fact carries a source URL + verified-as-of timestamp. Scheduled jobs replace the annual snapshot.
Phase 2 – Admin agents. Browser agents re-verify volatile facts (deadlines, cycle status, eligibility) on funder websites, diff against the graph, update rows and flag contradictions for human review. Data-quality agents handle entity resolution and caveats.
Phase 3 – Customer agents. A grant assistant for nonprofits: eligibility gating (geography, budget caps, 501(c)(3) status), deadline alerts, verified funder dossiers with citations, per-funder application framing.
Degree solved: A day of manual verification becomes minutes of review; no recommendation ships without a source-checked eligibility pass.
Costs and who pays: Small data (~756k funder records) means modest lakehouse compute plus LLM inference at pilot scale; funded by foundation/consultant tiers and sponsorship, free for small nonprofits.
TEAM
Leader: Christian Rodriguez
Asit Mahato
Martin Liu
INSPIRATION & MOTIVATION
Motivation: We ran a real grant search for Solar Austin and watched the best open dataset get it wrong twice: a missed $100k renewal and an ineligible “strong confidence” lead. The fix (agents browsing funder sites, citing every fact) worked, but it was manual. Nonprofits shouldn’t need a research team to find money that’s already publicly documented.
Inspiration: The Open Grant Data MCP (CC0, 7.5M-edge who-funds-whom graph) proves open data can power this. Agentic browser verification proved trust is automatable. And ASES SOLAR 2026 lands in Austin Oct 19-21: the national solar community will be here to see what funded local nonprofits deliver.
NEXT STEPS
Hackathon MVP: One Databricks pipeline (IRS 990 + funder-site ingest) refreshing six Texas funder dossiers; one admin agent re-verifying deadlines nightly and diffing against the graph.
Pilot (60 days): Solar Austin + TXSES’s five chapters as design partners; measure stale facts caught and volunteer hours saved.
Fall 2026: Demo at ASES SOLAR 2026 in Austin (Oct 19-21, Palmer Events Center); open the customer agent to Central Texas nonprofits.
Seek: Philanthropy-tech grants, Databricks nonprofit credits, City of Austin / Austin Energy community-program sponsorship.