Funding your Climate Journey With Grants: Winning at SBIR

Kay Aikin of Dynamic Grid shares her insights on how climate tech entrepreneurs can best leverage SBIR grants to grow their business in the earliest days.

Funding your climate journey with grants: winning at SBIR

As part of our “Funding your Climate Journey with Grants” series, we wanted to dive deeper into the most common source – federal grants. Specifically, the U.S. Government SBIR program.

The SBIR (Small Business Innovation Research) program is also officially known as America’s Seed Fund. Supported by the Small Business Administration, there are SBIR programs offered through eleven government agencies and total grants of over $3.2bn are awarded each year to over 5,000 companies.

Qualifying for a SBIR program is simple as companies need to only meet a few criteria:

• Company must be for profit
• U.S. owned/operated
• Under 500 people
• Focused on R&D – awards cannot purchase equipment or commercialize existing technology

To help understand SBIR grants in more detail, Enduring Planet sat down with Kay Aikin, the founder and Chief Product Officer of Dynamic Grid and a founder well versed in the SBIR program. As the recipient of more than 10 grants and government contracts, Kay has a wealth of knowledge and was willing to share with the Enduring Planet community.

A worthwhile pain in the 🍑

Based on her experience, Kay first acknowledged that the federal grant process is onerous and must be used well. With that in mind, the biggest keys to success are:

1. Minimize the technobabble: A successful application does not assume the reviewer knows everything about your technology. Define all terms and explain concepts clearly. Trust the old adage: “explain it like they’re five” (or close to it).
2. Understand what they want: You need to understand what the awarding agency is looking for in successful proposals, and key words can make all the difference. A great tactic is to read recent reports from the relevant agency to understand their goals and worldview, and mimic their perspective in your proposal.
3. Commercialization is essential: Grants are about achieving goals and if an application does not demonstrate a path to commercialization, it is unlikely to get funded. It’s important to recognize that the awarding agency is a customer, and your future commercial product is solving a real problem for them or their key stakeholders.
4. Mind the gap: Focus your SBIR research on the holes in your technology toward your path to commercialization. This may entail multiple awards from different programs or even different agencies to “flesh” out the technology stack. Also have an end commercialization target and be single-minded in that target. Don’t just use the SBIR grant to add to your revenue because you happen to know something about the topic; only go after the proposals that extend your chosen technology.

Don’t put all your 🥚 in one federal basket

Successful entrepreneurs need to look at many agencies, even when there might be an obvious choice for their particular startup. While you might be drawn to the Department of Energy for your modular microgrid startup, the Department of Defense (DOD) may end up being a better fit. In fact, the DOD has the most active program with over $1bn in annual grants and has a surprising number of programs relevant to climate. The Environmental Protection Agency, US Department of Agriculture, Department of Transportation, and National Science Foundation often have multiple award opportunities connected to climate.

Partners are your best friends for SBIR

Last but not least: if you can, don’t do it alone. SBIR grants not only present novel opportunities for building effective partnerships, but may also be easier to win with the right stakeholders on your side. Research partners, potential clients, and community groups all lend credibility to a startup’s efforts and also fill potential gaps in the application.

For example, if you’re proposing an innovative sensor to enable farmers to predict yields in a changing climate, you probably want a farmer cooperative or industry group as a partner to validate the need and effectiveness of the solution. You can also be strategic about where those partners are located and prioritize a key geography for the USDA, like Iowa. Timing is also important; Kay recommends startups find industry partners early. In reality, IP or competition risk is low, and the value add of a strong partner can be immense.

Extra resources

If you’re looking to apply, here are some additional external resources to support your SBIR application:

• Leveraging America’s Seed Fund. A brief presentation including an overview and guidance for entrepreneurs early in the grant process.
• Database of upcoming, currently open, and past programs across all 11 participating agencies.
• Most recent cohort of grantees from the EPA. A good example of what is being funded and hopefully some inspiration!

For more context and wisdom generally around grants, read our comprehensive guide about grants for climate change projects.

Kay Aikin is the co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Dynamic Grid, an energy software company based in Portland Maine. She is a graduate of Pennsylvania State University and holding a degree in energy/sustainability engineering. She has spent her career as an energy engineer, architectural designer, and business development executive, and the founder/CEO of Introspective Systems LLC, an AI-based complex systems software company focused on energy controls software that turned into Dynamic Grid.

Dynamic Grid’s AI-enabled grid flexibility control products help utilities decarbonize their distribution grids and meet their aggressive net-zero climate objectives. Our technology solves grid problems caused by both increasing distributed renewables supply and increased beneficial or strategic electrification demand on the local distribution grid. Unlike our competitors, our solutions provide superior consumer privacy and are cybersecure, scalable, and less expensive. The renewable energy transition is enabled with a suite of grid flexibility products – microgrid controllers, gateways, and consumer dashboards, that flexibly balance supply and demand continuously, resulting in up to 76% less grid infrastructure and reduced customer bills.