Our Story
GrantLedger started as a data company.
This is how a tool for reading foundation filings became a way to fund the nonprofits the system leaves out.
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. The first version of GrantLedger sold that research to 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 wore too many hats, and did not have the time to add another responsibility and take on grantwriting.
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, and every path the industry offered required funding they did not yet have.
So they asked, repeatedly, for us to do the work and be compensated when we are funded. At first we said no. That is what the industry said. 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 founding team.
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'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.
LinkedInBuilt 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.