Making each dollar count
We’re focused on getting the most bang for the buck at every stage of the process.
Our model of small-dollar investments enables us to be good stewards of taxpayer dollars. We spend the smallest possible amount of funding necessary at every phase of a project to determine whether or not it’s an idea worth pursuing. Only about one third of projects we fund will move beyond Phase One. This iterative approach to investing allows us to innovate without overspending, ensuring the products and services produced meet a real, verifiable need in the federal space.
And we’re not giving money to agencies directly — our funding isn’t a grant, but an investment into a potential solution. We use the budget for each project to hire and staff the teams that explore and evaluate ideas at each phase.
Key questions for funding
Our funding model can be broken down into four simple questions.
Teams research if the idea is trying to solve a real problem in the federal space worth solving and identify potential roadblocks, opportunities, and reach.
Teams dive deep to uncover the market fit, financial implication, timeline, regulatory factors, and scalability issues that would make it successful, while analyzing what could go right or wrong.
Teams design and develop a functional MVP with at least one agency customer, then determine the estimated cost to build and maintain it, create a roadmap, and establish a spend plan.
Teams receive a final round of funding to scale the solution to as many users as possible and implement an independent business model to make this thing a reality.