Why we built this
We built Strategic Pursuit to make winning federal funding a matter of evidence, not endurance.
Federal funding is not a search problem. It is a contest run against the clock — the money is finite, far more places are eligible than ever get funded, and the difference between funded and a polite decline is rarely the merit of the work. It is positioning, and who got there first. We built the tool that hands the outgunned team a defensible read on where it can actually win — in about eight minutes, not a week.
A DuBois Company Practice · duboiscompany.com
The problem
The week of analysis that ends in a leap of faith.
A two-person city grants shop tracks more than 350 IIJA programs by hand. An under-staffed sponsored-programs office cross-references solicitations across NSF, NIH, and the Department of Education for days. An AEC business-development lead races a client's RFP clock. Each of them spends the scarce thing — hours — assembling scattered official data into a recommendation. And then, because there was never time to verify every line, they make the call on a leap of faith: this program, probably, maybe, we think we qualify.
That leap is where credibility goes to die. One wrong CFDA number in front of a council. One hallucinated solicitation code in front of a PI. One discontinued program cited to a federal reviewer. The work was real; the exposure was unnecessary.
Then the ground moved. The 2025–26 federal funding environment — the NIH indirect-cost fight, roughly 57% proposed cuts to EPSCoR and TCUP, MSI and IMLS and NEH disruption, volatile discretionary windows — turned a hard job into a moving target. When the field shifts mid-pursuit, the team that knows which formula lanes, state programs, and congressional earmark requests are still live repositions in an afternoon. The team still cross-referencing by hand finds out a program died after it drafted the application. All that turmoil is the argument for a tool like this, not against one.
Our mission
Make the pursuit of federal funding something you can prove — line by line — before the meeting instead of after the week.
We don't make you faster at chasing everything. We make you the team that chases the right thing, knows it can win, and can prove it line by line. That is the edge — and it is only unfair because the other side is still guessing.
The promise is the same in a council chamber, a provost's office, and a client pitch: walk in knowing the work behind your recommendation will survive scrutiny. Conviction instead of exposure.
Our standard of proof
The verdict is bold because the receipts are shown.
Strategic Pursuit is not raw AI output dressed up as confidence. Trust here is built into how the tool works, not just promised in the copy. Five things make the read defensible:
- 01
The AI does the work. The facts come from the government.
The AI runs the research — it finds your city or campus, pulls the sources, and drafts the reasoning. But it doesn't get to invent the numbers. The dollars, designations, and deadlines in your dossier come straight from official federal databases, not from the AI's memory.
- 02
Eligibility is decided by the rules in the law, not the AI.
Each program carries hard eligibility rules taken straight from the law — a population cap, a rural threshold, a designation requirement. Fail one and the program comes back ineligible, and the AI can never overrule it. That is why a no-go is trustworthy: it came from the rule, not a hunch.
- 03
Every claim cites its source.
Each matched program shows its CFDA / Assistance Listing, its statutory authority, its source, and a visible last-verified date. Each institutional designation cites the exact statute in its tooltip — HBCU per HEA §322(2) (20 U.S.C. §1061(2)), HSI per Title V §502(a)(5) at 25% Hispanic FTE undergrad, land-grant 1862 / 1890 / 1994. Citations are a design feature here, not legalese to hide.
VERIFIEDUSAspending · last updated 2026-05-28 - 04
Stale data gets flagged; discontinued programs are never shown.
Anything unverified past 180 days carries a verify-with-agency note. Past 365 days, it can't be called a high-fit match. Discontinued programs are never shown at all. The read gets truer over time, and it tells you how fresh each item is.
Requested ≠ enactedA congressional request is not yet secured money.
Earmark records show what a member requested from the Appropriations Committee — the amount Congress directs in the final bill is typically lower. We label these “Requested · not yet enacted” and never present a request as money in hand. - 05
The honest no-go is the edge.
A tool that says yes to everything is a liability to a team that despises the shotgun approach. We say no with the same conviction we say go — because the no-go you trust is the rival's wasted week you didn't spend. A disciplined decline renders in a deliberately different, darker color than the green-light verdict, with an explicit text reason. Saying no is delivered with conviction; it is never dressed up as a win.
The swagger is licensed only because the source is shown. We are bold about the verdict — never about the data, which is just true.
Honest positioning
We market a verifiable method — not data parity.
One tool serves two audiences: U.S. cities and the civil-infrastructure firms that serve them, and degree-granting institutions of higher education — research universities, regional universities, and community colleges — as funding applicants. (Funding flows to these entities; they are grant-seekers. We do not support K–12 or school districts.) We hold both to the same standard of proof, and we will be straight about where we stand.
The city dossier is live and rich; the institution data is still filling in.
We complement your system of record. We do not replace it.
For a sponsored-programs office, Strategic Pursuit sits ahead of Cayuse, Kuali, and InfoEd — the strategic read on which opportunities are worth entering into your system in the first place. It is not a second home for your proposal data.
For higher-ed, “win” means rigor — never aggression.
The civil and AEC language — pursuit, pipeline, go/no-go — belongs on the civil side. On the higher-ed side it turns into plain strategic seriousness: steadying your portfolio, broadening participation, the limited submission, where your HERD research spending ranks against your true Carnegie peer group, the EPSCoR and Title III openings rivals overlook. We use only publicly posted Federal Student Aid totals — never student-level records. The contest is real; the cynicism is not invited.
One tool, your language
Two audiences. One standard of proof. A different-sized contest.
Name one entity — a U.S. city or a degree-granting institution — and get a ranked, sourced dossier scoring 205 federal programs across more than two dozen federal agencies three ways: are you eligible, does it fit, and how competitive would you be. The method is identical. The contest is just a different size in each world, spoken in your language.
For cities and the firms that serve them.
173 city-eligible programs, plain-spoken and decisive, and the lane most databases miss entirely — nearby congressional earmark requests (CDS / CPF) showing who asked, for what, from which subcommittee, for how much, and which member made the request. For AEC firms, that is a head start before the RFP even drops. What proves it: dollars won and the earmark you saw first.
How it reads a cityFor universities and colleges.
32 institution-eligible programs scored against your research scale and designations, with where your HERD research spending and federal share rank against your true Carnegie peer group, how much of your funding rides on a single agency, and a much higher bar for what counts as competitive than for cities. Built to steady a portfolio through the 2025–26 upheaval. What proves it: your HERD ranking and Carnegie peer position.
How it reads an institutionPlace a city dossier and a higher-ed dossier side by side and they read as unmistakably the same tool with a different-sized contest — same layout, same way of showing its proof, different language. Never two products.
The practice
Built by operators, inside a firm that optimizes work.
Strategic Pursuit is a DuBois Company Practice. It was built by people who have lived the long analyst hours and the leap of faith — who know the difference between a list and a verdict, and who would rather hand you a defensible no-go than a flattering maybe. The tool carries the discipline of a forensic analyst and the read of the sharpest business-development lead you ever worked with.
DuBois Company is the parent practice — its work is making work better. Strategic Pursuit is the funding-intelligence tool in that portfolio: the same standard applied to the highest-stakes call a small public-mission team has to make.
A DuBois Company Practice
Work optimized.Explore the rest of the practice at duboiscompany.com →We don't publish invented customer logos or testimonials. When named references and hit-rate proof are real, they'll appear here — sourced, like everything else.
Straight answers
The questions a skeptic asks first.
- Is the Strategic Pursuit dossier just AI output?
- No. The AI does the research, but it doesn't get to make up the numbers. The facts come straight from official federal databases, not the AI's memory. And eligibility isn't a guess: every program is checked against the real rules from the law, so if you fail a hard rule — a population cap, a rural threshold, a designation requirement — it comes back ineligible no matter what the AI thinks. Every program shows its source and last-verified date so you can check every claim before you cite it.
- Who is behind Strategic Pursuit?
- Strategic Pursuit is a DuBois Company Practice — a funding-intelligence tool built inside the DuBois Company portfolio, whose work is making work better. It was built by people who have lived the long analyst hours and the leap of faith that come with chasing federal funding by hand.
- Why one platform for both cities and universities?
- Because both make the same kind of high-stakes call that an expert will check line by line, where one wrong CFDA number or made-up funding notice ends their credibility. We hold both to the same standard of proof — a method you can verify, with sources shown — and only change the language at the surface. Two brands would build the same trust twice; one builds it once and makes it stronger.
- Is the higher-ed data as complete as the city data?
- Not yet, and we say so plainly. The city dossier is live and rich today; the institution data is still filling in, loaded a source at a time, and any panel without official data says so rather than inventing a number. The promise is a method you can verify, not equal data on both sides — and the method holds today: designation eligibility with the law cited, the 205-program catalog checked against the real rules, and a clear eligible / not-eligible verdict.
- Does this replace our grant writer, consultant, or sponsored-programs system?
- No — it makes them higher-hit-rate. It hands your writer or PI a ranked, cited starting read in about eight minutes, so the week once spent triaging and verifying becomes the week spent on the applications you can actually win. For institutions, it sits upstream of Cayuse, Kuali, and InfoEd as the strategic read, not a second source of truth.
- Will you guarantee we win funding?
- No. The edge is positioning, not certainty. We will tell you where you can win, where you can't, and why — with every claim sourced — and a disciplined no-go delivered as confidently as a go. What we guarantee is a read your domain expert can check line by line, before the meeting instead of after the week.
The edge is knowing before they do
Win the funding you can prove you'll win.
Name one entity. In about eight minutes, get the ranked, cited read your reviewer will check line by line — and it holds.
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