SEED ROUND: MEET THE FOUNDER
OPENGRANTS
BY Russell Nichols
It sounds like a paradox: If you want free money, you have to pay for it. But
that is how it typically works when applying for public funds. Serial entrepre-
neur Sedale Turbovsky set out to change that model with his startup, Open-
Grants, a free platform that uses machine learning to sift through, list and
match users with grant writers and opportunities.
Based in Sacramento, OpenGrants launched in September 2018. The idea
came to Turbovsky, the startup’s CEO, after a previous venture forced him to
think about why applying for public funds was so hard and expensive.
“The process is frighteningly bad,” he says. “It’s burdensome and exclu-
sionary and not a good system. Easily 30 percent of your award is eaten up in
administration and opportunity cost.”
The machine learning technology saves time and resources by
summarizing and discovering grants. As a result, OpenGrants reduces
the opportunity cost inherent in the grant funding process by 30-40
percent, he says. The team consists of three full-time employees.
Users will be matched to a grant writer with domain expertise
from a group of freelancers curated by OpenGrants (these are
contractors who set their own rates, and OpenGrants makes
money on that transaction). The platform has about 100 users
as of March.
Egeria.
My backup name for the startup was................................................
a river guide.
If I could have any other job, I’d be ......................................................
focus.
A startup can’t be successful without...................................................
The book that best represents my approach to business would be ......
“Shantaram,” by Gregory David Roberts.
.......................................................................................................................
“Honestly, I wasn’t
My biggest fear about launching was ..........................................................
worried about launching.”
.......................................................................................................................
DOES THIS PLATFORM SUPPORT UNDERREPRESENTED GROUPS?
“Public funding has a serious equity problem. … For underrepresented
groups, (OpenGrants) makes funding easier and more affordable to
discover, apply for and manage. For funding organizations, (Open-
Grants) sells aggregated data that allows them to engage these
groups to meet supplier diversity goals.”
IS OPENGRANTS DESIGNED TO BE MORE USER-FRIENDLY?
“Similar to how Intuit, with TurboTax, unraveled the complexity
of the tax code, we did the same for grant complexity.”
For more on OpenGrants, read Russell Nichols’ Startup of the
Month column at comstocksmag.com.
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comstocksmag.com | May 2020
SEDALE TURBOVSKY