Trust is enforced in code — not promised in copy.
A federal-funding dossier is checked line by line by the domain expert who carries it into the room. One wrong CFDA number, one hallucinated solicitation, one dead program, and your credibility is gone. So we built Strategic Pursuit to survive that check: the AI orchestrates the research, the data stays ground truth, and every claim shows its source and its last-verified date.
The verdict is bold because the receipts are shown.
In short
Strategic Pursuit is a federal-funding intelligence instrument whose dossiers are not raw AI output. A pure-logic scorer decides eligibility from each program's statute; the server re-fetches authoritative federal data after the model runs; stale data is demoted or hidden; and every program shows its source and last-verified date. We use only public data — never NSLDS or student-level records.
The architecture
How the read survives the line-by-line check
- 1
The AI orchestrates; the data is ground truth.
Our AI resolves the entity and pulls the sources — but it does not get to invent the numbers. The dollars, designations, and deadlines in your dossier are pulled from official government systems and re-checked, not recalled by the AI.
- 2
Eligibility is decided by a pure-logic scorer, not a guess.
Hard eligibility rules encoded from each program's statute short-circuit ineligible programs out of the ranking — rural thresholds, population caps, designation gates, research-scale floors. The model is only a soft hint; the statute decides. That's why a no-go is defensible, not a vibe.
- 3
Every claim carries its receipt.
Each designation cites its statute (for example, HBCU per HEA §322(2); HSI per Title V §502(a)(5) at 25% Hispanic FTE). Each program shows its CFDA / Assistance Listing, its statutory authority, its source, and a visible last-verified date — rendered as a proof-stamp, not buried in a tooltip.
- 4
Stale and dead data can't masquerade as fresh.
Anything unverified past 180 days carries a verify-with-agency note. Past 365 days, it cannot be called a high-fit match. Discontinued programs are never surfaced. Honesty is a code path, not a promise.
Where the facts come from
Every fact traces to an official source.
Strategic Pursuit reads from official, public federal sources — and tells you which one backed each fact. We render agency names in plain text only; we never use any agency seal, badge, or insignia.
City / civil sources (15)
U.S. Census American Community Survey · USAspending · OpenFEMA · Grants.gov · Treasury SLFRF allocations and Project & Expenditure reports · CEJST / Justice40 · HUD QCT / DDA / CDBG · National Bridge Inventory · EPA ECHO · CDC PLACES · Senate Congressionally Directed Spending (CDS) requests.
Higher-ed sources (9)
IPEDS (Header, HERD, Finance) · NSF · NIH RePORTER · NCES College Scorecard · Federal Student Aid (FSA) Title IV aggregates · ED Office of Postsecondary Education designations · FFATA subawards.
Live sources (Census, USAspending, OpenFEMA, Grants.gov) are queried at run time. Warehouse sources refresh on a published cron cadence — appropriations weekly, snapshots monthly, higher-ed award sources weekly — and the earmark layer ingests weekly from roughly 500 congressional sites.
This product uses the Grants.gov API but is not endorsed or certified by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
We never touch student-level data
We never touch student-level data
NSLDS and student-level records are out of scope — entirely.
Our honesty commitments
We codify honesty as named commitments.
- Sourced and dated.
- Every program shows its source and a last-verified date. If we can't stand behind a fact's freshness, we say so on the fact.
- Staleness gating.
- ≥180 days unverified → a verify-with-agency note. ≥365 days → it cannot be ranked as a high-fit match. Discontinued → never surfaced.
- Requested ≠ enacted.
- Congressional earmark records show what a member requested from the Appropriations Committee. The amount Congress directs in the final bill is typically lower — so we label these 'Requested · not yet enacted' and never present a request as secured money.
- The honest no-go.
- We say no with the same conviction we say go. A tool that says yes to everything is a liability to a thin team; a no-go you can defend is the rival's wasted week you didn't spend.
- Method, not parity.
- Our promise is a verifiable method, not equal data depth everywhere. Where a data warehouse is still filling, the panel says so plainly rather than inventing a number — and it gets truer as each source loads on its cron. We will not show you a figure we don't hold.
Platform security
The controls behind the verdict.
- Hosting and data.
- The application runs on Vercel; structured data lives in managed Postgres (Neon). Data is encrypted in transit (TLS), and both Vercel and Neon encrypt stored data at rest by default.
- Authentication.
- Auth.js v5 with credentials (Microsoft 365 SSO coming soon), mandatory email verification before access, and rate-limited sign-in, sign-up, and password reset. Passwords are stored only as salted hashes.
- Tenant isolation.
- Every data read is scoped to your tenant; dossiers, history, and usage never cross firm or institution boundaries.
- Billing integrity.
- Payments are processed by Stripe; we never store full card numbers. Subscription webhooks are idempotent and guarded against out-of-order events, so a billing event can't be replayed to corrupt your account state.
- Abuse controls.
- Per-tenant run limits and a per-hour throttle protect availability; background data jobs fail closed without their secrets.
- SOC 2.
- We have not completed a SOC 2 audit, and we won't say we have until the attestation exists. Because the platform uses only public federal data — no student-level records, no sensitive personal data — the highest-sensitivity class is out of scope; we're glad to review our current controls with your procurement team under NDA at security@strategicpursuit.ai.
Responsible disclosure: found something? Email security@strategicpursuit.ai. We respond, and we don't shoot the messenger.
Accessibility
WCAG 2.1 AA / Section 508 / VPAT.
We build to WCAG 2.1 AA, with AAA contrast on primary reading text. Color never carries meaning alone — every eligible / verify / ineligible state pairs its color with an explicit text verdict and a distinct icon, and the GO verdict and the disciplined NO-GO differ in lightness as well as hue so the distinction survives any color-vision deficiency. Every interactive element has a visible keyboard focus state, statute-citation tooltips are reachable and dismissible by keyboard, and the exported PDF dossier is readable and auditable.
This matters because accessibility is a procurement gate for sponsored-programs offices and a credibility signal for civic buyers — not an afterthought. We build to Section 508 / WCAG 2.1 AA and welcome accessibility questions or conformance requests at accessibility@strategicpursuit.ai.
Subprocessors
A small set of vetted subprocessors.
Each is contractually bound to process data only on our instructions. This list is current as of May 2026 and is the authoritative source the Privacy Policy refers to.
| Provider | Purpose | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Vercel | Application hosting and delivery | United States |
| Neon | Managed Postgres database | United States |
| Stripe | Payment processing and subscription billing | United States |
| Anthropic | AI model orchestrating the research loop | United States |
| Optional OAuth sign-in and (when enabled) Google Analytics 4 | United States | |
| Resend | Transactional email delivery | United States |
We'll update this list and its date when we add or change a subprocessor. To be notified of changes before they take effect, email security@strategicpursuit.ai. Federal data sources that populate a dossier are official public sources, documented in “Where the facts come from” above.
Trust questions, answered
The objections a buyer raises first.
- Will the AI hallucinate a CFDA number, a solicitation, or a deadline?
- That's the exact failure mode we engineered against. Eligibility is decided by a pure-logic statutory scorer, not the model, and the numbers — CFDA / Assistance Listings, solicitation codes, deadlines, designations — are re-fetched server-side from authoritative sources after the model runs. Every claim shows its source and last-verified date, so you can check it before you ever cite it.
- Is the data actually current?
- Yes, and we show the proof per item. Live sources are queried at run time; warehouse sources refresh on a published cron; the earmark layer ingests weekly. Anything unverified past 180 days carries a verify-with-agency note, anything past 365 days can't be a high-fit match, and discontinued programs are never surfaced.
- Do you use student-level data or NSLDS?
- No. The higher-ed dossier uses only publicly posted FSA aggregates and other public sources. We never access or store NSLDS or any student-level records.
- Do you have SOC 2, a VPAT, and FERPA assurances?
- We build to that bar directly. We use only public data, which removes the highest-sensitivity class of risk from scope, and we build to WCAG 2.1 AA / Section 508. We have not completed a SOC 2 audit yet — and we won't claim one until we have; because the platform handles only public federal data, we're glad to walk your procurement team through our current controls under NDA. Enterprise engagements scope SSO (on our roadmap) and the additional controls a large security office requires.
- Is a Strategic Pursuit dossier an official eligibility determination?
- No. It's a defensible, cited read to inform your decision. Eligibility scoring applies the rules encoded from each program's statute, but only the administering agency makes an official determination — which is why every dossier tells you to verify directly with the agency before applying.
See the receipts on your own entity.
Run a real dossier on your city or institution and check it line by line — the way your reviewer will. No credit card. 30-day trial: 3 runs, 1 seat.
This product uses the Grants.gov API but is not endorsed or certified by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Strategic Pursuit — A DuBois Company Practice.