The Problem with Federal Funding Search Today
Anyone who has spent time on Grants.gov or SAM.gov knows the frustration. Expired listings mixed with open ones. Limited search filters. No way to match opportunities to your actual situation. Results that seem designed to waste your time rather than save it. The core issues are familiar. Outdated listings everywhere: Grants.gov and SAM.gov both display closed opportunities alongside open ones. You find something promising, click through, and discover the deadline passed six months ago. Limited filtering options: SAM.gov lets you filter by NAICS code, but combining multiple criteria (location, set-aside status, response deadline, award amount) requires navigating a clunky interface that fights you at every step. No plain-language search: you know what you do, but you shouldn't need to translate that into the exact bureaucratic terminology each agency happens to use. And fragmented sources: federal grants are on Grants.gov, federal contracts are on SAM.gov, state opportunities are scattered across dozens of portals, foundation grants require yet another set of searches. There's no single place to look.
What Funding Landscape Does Differently
We aggregate opportunities from Grants.gov, SAM.gov, state procurement portals, foundation databases, and other sources into one searchable interface. We clean and structure the data before you see it. A note on expectations: federal funding data is messy. Agencies post opportunities in inconsistent formats, bury key details in attachments, and sometimes leave listings up long after they've closed. We've worked hard to normalize this data and filter out the noise, but we can't guarantee perfection. What we can guarantee is that you'll find opportunities you didn't know existed, things that make you say "wait, there's funding for that?" Only open opportunities. When something closes, it disappears from our results. We check sources daily and remove expired listings so you're not wasting time on dead ends. Structured metadata where available. We extract eligibility requirements, funding amounts, NAICS codes, set-aside designations, and deadlines from the source data. Some opportunities have rich metadata; others have almost none. We show you what we have and flag confidence levels so you know when to dig deeper. Advanced filtering across every criteria. Filter by NAICS code, small business set-aside type (8(a), HUBZone, SDVOSB, WOSB), location, deadline, funding amount, agency, and more. Combine as many filters as you need. Saved search alerts. Once you dial in a search that works for you, save it. We'll run it daily and notify you when something new matches.
Finding Federal Grants
The federal grant landscape spans dozens of agencies: DOE, NSF, NIH, USDA, EPA, DOT, HUD, and many others. Each has its own programs, priorities, and application processes. On Grants.gov, you can search by keyword, agency, eligibility, and category. These filters help, but they return a lot of noise. You still have to click through each result, read the synopsis, and figure out whether it's actually worth your time. Funding Landscape surfaces opportunities that are relevant to what you're looking for and gives you enough context upfront to decide whether to dig deeper. We're not going to tell you definitively whether you're eligible (that nuance lives in the full solicitation and sometimes requires a call to the program officer). But we can get you to the short list faster, so you're spending your investigation time on opportunities that have a real chance of being a fit. SBIR and STTR programs are among the most valuable federal funding sources for technology companies. Nearly a dozen agencies participate: NSF, DOE, NIH, DOD, and others, each with different focus areas and timelines. Funding Landscape aggregates SBIR/STTR opportunities across all participating agencies so you can search them in one place rather than checking each agency separately.
Finding Government Contracts Through SAM.gov
SAM.gov is the official source for federal contracting opportunities over $25,000. If you want to sell products or services to the federal government, this is where the opportunities are posted. The challenge is finding them efficiently. SAM.gov's search works, but it requires you to already know exactly what you're looking for. You need to know your NAICS codes, your PSC codes, which agencies buy what you sell, and how to interpret the various notice types (Sources Sought, Presolicitation, Solicitation, Combined Synopsis). NAICS codes (North American Industry Classification System) are how the federal government categorizes businesses. Your primary NAICS code determines which set-aside contracts you're eligible for and which size standards apply to you. Finding opportunities by NAICS code on SAM.gov is straightforward. Finding opportunities across multiple related NAICS codes, while also filtering by deadline, location, and set-aside type, is where things get tedious. Funding Landscape lets you search across all your NAICS codes at once, perfect for contractors with multiple specialties, and then narrow results by the filters that matter most.
Small Business Set-Asides
The federal government sets aside a portion of contracts for small businesses, including specific designations: 8(a) Business Development Program for socially and economically disadvantaged businesses, HUBZone for businesses in historically underutilized business zones, SDVOSB (Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business), WOSB (Women-Owned Small Business), and EDWOSB (Economically Disadvantaged Women-Owned Small Business). If you hold one of these certifications, filtering for your set-aside type is essential. On SAM.gov, this requires a multi-step process through their filtering interface. Funding Landscape makes it a single click. State and local opportunities are often less competitive than federal funding, but the problem is fragmentation. Every state has its own procurement portal with its own interface. We aggregate state-level opportunities into the same search, so you're not checking a dozen different sites. Private foundations represent another major funding source, especially for nonprofits. We're building out foundation coverage alongside government sources.
AI-Native Search: The Real Unlock
Here's where Funding Landscape diverges from every other grant database: we built it for AI from the start. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is a standard that lets AI assistants access external tools and data sources. We've built an MCP integration that lets AI assistants like Claude search Funding Landscape directly. This isn't a chatbot bolted onto a search box. It's a fundamentally different way to find funding. Your AI brings context you'd never type into a search box. When you search Grants.gov, you type keywords. When your AI searches Funding Landscape, it brings everything it knows: your organization type, your location, your NAICS codes, the proposal you're working on, the conversation you had last week about expanding into a new market. You don't have to translate your situation into search terms. The AI already understands it. Documents become search queries. Upload a capability statement, a past proposal, or a strategic plan. Your AI can read it and search for opportunities that match, not just keyword matches, but conceptual matches based on what you actually do and where you're trying to go. Instead of clicking through filters, you can just say "find me DOE opportunities related to the geothermal work we discussed, with deadlines in the next 90 days, where we'd be eligible as a small business." The AI translates that into the right combination of queries and filters.
Getting Started
Funding Landscape is live and free to try. Fair warning: we're still early and things are rough in places. But the data is real, the search works, and you can start finding opportunities today. For power users who want saved search alerts, advanced filters, and API access, we offer paid plans. Our sources page shows where we're pulling data from and how recently each source was updated. Transparency about data freshness is something the government portals don't provide, and we think it matters. Whether you're a small business looking for federal contracts, a nonprofit seeking foundation grants, a researcher hunting for SBIR funding, or a contractor trying to find state-level opportunities, the goal is the same: surface every opportunity you could apply to, filter out the noise, and make search actually work.