About Fundizzle

Here's a fun stat: researchers spend 20 to 40 percent of their working time on grant applications. Most of which get rejected. The people who should be doing science are instead reformatting the same biosketch for the 47th time and wondering why their life choices led them here.

We built Fundizzle because that's stupid. Not you — the system. Finding the right grants, wrestling with formatting, tracking deadlines across a dozen agencies — none of that requires a PhD. It's busywork, and it shouldn't eat your life.

Fundizzle uses AI to handle the matching, the drafting, and the deadline tracking so you can focus on the parts that actually need your brain. Our goal: make grant funding accessible to every researcher who deserves it, not just the ones with a grant-writing office down the hall.

Tell us about your research. Connect your ORCID for a one-click import, upload a CV, or just describe what you do. Most researchers have a useful profile in under five minutes.

From there, our AI builds an understanding of your work — not just keywords, but what you actually study, how you approach it, and what kind of funding fits your career stage. It matches that understanding against thousands of active grants from federal agencies, private foundations, and international funders.

When something fits, we show you why — not just a title and deadline, but a breakdown of how the opportunity connects to your specific research. You can dig into eligibility, see funding patterns, and get a realistic sense of your chances before investing weeks in an application.

Ready to apply? Fundizzle drafts the documents. Biosketch, project summary, specific aims, budget justification — tailored to the agency format. And DizzChat, your AI grant advisor, is there throughout to answer questions, tighten the narrative, and catch compliance issues before you hit submit.

Let's get this out of the way: Fundizzle is not a chatbot with a grant database bolted on. We built purpose-specific AI for grant discovery and application work. The matching understands your research at a conceptual level — it knows that “tropical forest carbon dynamics” and “climate change mitigation through ecosystem management” are related, even though they share zero keywords.

Every AI operation is logged and auditable. We track what happens, what it costs us, and why the AI made the recommendations it did. Transparency isn't optional when we're handling your research profile.

Most grant platforms were built for nonprofit development officers. The vocabulary is wrong, the grant sources are wrong, and the assumptions about how grant writing works are wrong. Writing a letter of inquiry and writing specific aims are completely different activities. We know the difference.

Fundizzle speaks research. We know what a biosketch is supposed to say. We know what reviewers actually look for. When DizzChat gives you advice, it's grounded in how academic grant review actually works — not generic nonprofit fundraising tips.

And we're built for every career stage. A postdoc hunting for fellowships and a senior PI juggling a portfolio of concurrent grants have very different needs. Fundizzle adapts — surfacing the right opportunities and scaling its help to match where you are.

Fundizzle was founded by Amy Wolkowinski (CEO) and Alexander Shenkin (CTO). Alex is a researcher turned engineer — he spent years in academia dealing with the grant grind firsthand before deciding to build something about it. Amy brings deep experience in research operations and knows exactly how broken the system is from the institutional side.

We're a small, focused team that moves fast and actually reads our email. If you have questions, feedback, or you found a bug, hit us up at [email protected].

Your research data is sensitive. We get it. Fundizzle operates under SOC 2 practices: encrypted in transit and at rest, access controls, audit logging, the works. Our AI providers process your data under strict agreements — your data never trains their models, never gets sold, never gets shared. Period.

We also care about accessibility. We target WCAG 2.2 AA compliance because grant access shouldn't have an accessibility tax.