Our Story
We started with data.
Nonprofits shaped what came next.
GrantLedger began as a foundation research tool. Listening to nonprofit leaders turned it into a grantwriting partner built around the support they needed.
How we started
We started as a data company.
We built a tool that gives charities the same foundation research the big databases sell, for about 90% off. We started by serving nonprofits running their own grant programs.
Within weeks, the same conversation kept happening. The executive directors we worked with were running everything alone: program lead, fundraiser, bookkeeper, board liaison, and the person who answers the phone. They already wore too many hats. There was no time to take on grantwriting, too.
They did not need another tool. They did not need another login or another to-do list. They could not afford to hire a grant writer. Every path they found required funding they did not yet have.
So they kept asking us to do the work and be compensated once their organizations received funding. At first we said no. That was the industry's answer, too. But the request kept coming.
We asked ourselves:
If the existing model fails the organizations that need grants most, whose interests does it actually serve?
We built GrantLedger, and the nonprofit-first model, to be the yes.
Nonprofit-First Grantwriting is what saying yes looked like.
The team.
Jake Simon
Jake studied applied math and economics at Brown and holds a master's in engineering from Columbia. At EY he was a mathematician; at JPMorgan, a machine learning engineer and data scientist who built algorithms on the same 990 data to find a global bank's wealthiest prospects. He left to point that same skill, and that same data, the other way: at the small nonprofits the system overlooks, to find the funding they need.
LinkedIn
Nick Dusold
Nick's work starts with the same instinct every time: understand the real problems of the people doing the hard, everyday work, then build something tailored to solve them. He has built and launched products, founded his own company, and spent years in direct sales getting genuinely useful products into the right hands. He and Jake partnered around a shared conviction: that the standards and tools of the for-profit world could be turned toward the organizations the existing system has left behind.
LinkedInWhat connects our work
Built on the source, not on tools.
Most grant writers and in-house teams rent the same subscription research tools, a layer of curated information sitting on top of a much larger body of data. All of our offerings are built directly on top of the public 990 record.
GrantLedger is operated by LC Ventures Holdings LLC, a Wyoming-organized limited liability company. All terms of the engagement are set forth in the Grant Services Agreement.