LazyGrant

Inspiration

As aspiring startup founders, we’ve spent countless hours researching funding opportunities—only to find ourselves overwhelmed by the time-consuming and complex nature of grant applications. We quickly realized this wasn’t just our struggle—many early-stage founders miss out on vital funding simply because the application process is too demanding. That shared pain point became the spark behind LazyGrant.

What it does

LazyGrant is an AI-powered tool that helps founders fill out institutional grant forms quickly and effectively. Users upload the grant document, provide some basic inputs, and our system intelligently asks follow-up questions before auto-generating a completed application. It even allows users to highlight specific parts of the draft and ask the AI to revise them—making it more interactive and customizable.

How we built it

We built LazyGrant using a React + Vite frontend to ensure a responsive and fast user experience. Our backend runs on a Generative AI API that handles natural language generation, question prompting, and draft creation. The two are currently connected via modular endpoints, which we plan to streamline in the next version.

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest challenge was scope creep—we initially had ambitious plans to support multiple grant formats, dynamic editing, and scoring predictions. With limited time, we had to prioritize core features and re-scope carefully. We also ran into integration difficulties between our frontend and the AI backend due to versioning and time constraints.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re especially proud of the polished front-end experience. The entire interface is fully animated with color-changing input boxes and dynamic transitions that make interacting with LazyGrant both intuitive and enjoyable. For a hackathon timeframe, the visual quality stands out.

What we learned

This project taught us the importance of task delegation, especially in a team setting with tight deadlines. We also saw firsthand how crucial commenting and documenting code is for quick handoffs and collaboration. Clear boundaries and communication made all the difference in hitting key milestones.

What's next for LazyGrant

Our next step is to complete the full AI integration. Currently, the AI backend runs independently as a separate module, but our goal is to have seamless, real-time interaction between the user interface and the language model. We’re also looking to support more grant formats and add collaboration tools so startup teams can work on applications together.