Inspiration
Traditional grant funding often relies on upfront payments and delayed audits, making it difficult to detect fraud or verify whether funded projects achieve their intended outcomes. I built ImpactRelease to make charitable funding more transparent, accountable and outcome-driven through AI-powered verification and milestone-based disbursements.
What it does
ImpactRelease converts grant descriptions into structured milestones with predefined budgets, evidence requirements and a 10% retention holdback.
- AI Contract Agent: Converts natural-language grant objectives into measurable milestones.
- Evidence Verification: Uses one-time challenge codes, Gemini Vision OCR, SHA-256 and perceptual hashing to detect reused or manipulated evidence.
- Fraud Detection: An adversarial Skeptic Agent identifies suspicious submissions and inconsistencies.
- Multi-Party Verification: Enables vendors and beneficiaries to independently confirm deliveries or raise disputes.
- Automated Disbursement: A deterministic six-rule engine controls milestone releases through PayPal Payouts.
- Auditor Workspace: Provides financial reconciliation, a double-entry ledger and forensic project timelines.
How we built it
I built ImpactRelease using React, FastAPI, Python and PostgreSQL.
- PayPal Orders API and Payouts API for funding and milestone-based disbursements.
- Google Gemini for contract generation, multimodal evidence verification and adversarial fraud analysis.
- SHA-256, dHash and similarity analysis for duplicate evidence detection.
- SQLModel and PostgreSQL for transactional consistency, concurrency control and double-entry accounting.
- AG Grid for the auditor dashboard.
- Render and Postman for deployment and API testing.
Challenges we ran into
- Preventing concurrent requests and duplicate payouts through database locking and idempotency.
- Protecting the 10% retention holdback from premature disbursement.
- Distinguishing actual project functionality from photographs that only demonstrate delivery.
- Maintaining balanced financial records across captures, payouts, failures and refunds.
- Handling asynchronous PayPal webhooks and transaction reconciliation.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
- Built an end-to-end grant funding and milestone disbursement workflow.
- Implemented multi-agent investigation with deterministic financial release controls.
- Developed an immutable double-entry ledger with automated balance verification.
- Added payout reconciliation, fraud escalation and a forensic auditor workspace.
- Achieved 54 passing automated tests and a successful frontend production build.
What we learned
I learned how to integrate payment APIs into financial workflows, design reliable transaction systems, build adversarial multi-agent AI architectures and use cryptographic and perceptual hashing for evidence verification. Most importantly, I learned that AI should support financial decisions, while deterministic rules must enforce them.
What's next for Impact-Release
- Build a grant marketplace connecting sponsors with NGOs through competitive proposals.
- Integrate satellite imagery and IoT telemetry for independent outcome verification.
- Expand cross-project fraud intelligence and adaptive investigations.
- Explore PayPal marketplace integrations and authorized partner-based fund custody for production deployment.
