How to find out who already got funded for work like yours
Federal award records are public. Reading them tells you what a realistic ask looks like, which institute writes the cheques in your area, and which programme officer signed off.
The most useful question before writing an application is not "is my science good enough". It is "who has already been paid to do something adjacent, and how much did they get".
That information is public. Most founders never look.
What the award records give you
Federal award databases publish funded projects: the title and abstract, the institution, the amount, the year, the funding institute, and often the programme official attached to it.
Three things fall out of that immediately.
A realistic number. If comparable projects at comparable organisations were funded in a particular range, you know what a defensible ask looks like. Founders routinely ask for too little out of caution, which reads as an under-scoped project rather than a modest one.
The right institute. Large agencies are not monoliths. Within NIH, different institutes fund different slices of the same disease area with different appetites. The records show which one actually funded work like yours, which is better evidence than the institute's own mission statement.
A named human. The programme official on a comparable award is, by definition, someone who has already decided this kind of work is worth funding.
How to read them without fooling yourself
- Match on mechanism, not just topic. An R01 to a major academic centre is
not precedent for your SBIR Phase I. Same disease, entirely different competition and budget shape.
- Match on stage. A funded clinical programme tells you little about what a
preclinical platform can raise.
- Look at the year. Priorities move. A cluster of awards five years ago and
none since is a signal, and not a good one.
- Read the abstracts, not just the titles. Titles are written to be
impressive. Abstracts tell you what was actually promised.
What to do with it
Two things, both concrete.
First, size your ask against what actually got funded, and say why your budget matches the scope. Reviewers notice when a budget is reverse-engineered from a cap rather than built from the work.
Second, use the precedent in conversations. "Your institute funded three projects on adjacent biology in the last two years, and here is how ours differs" is a different opening than "we are working on something exciting".
It is also the single most persuasive slide in an investor deck, because it replaces your opinion about non-dilutive potential with a list of real cheques written for work like yours.
SixthGrant queries the real award records for companies at your stage doing your science, and shows the median they raised, the institute, and the officer — every row linking back to the actual record. Nothing modelled, nothing estimated.
Stop finding out too late.
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