Canada’s ‘Grant Angel’ is building the ‘Spotify’ of grant funding

Founder Stephanie Sang shares her journey of becoming the go-to expert, creating a platform to match businesses with grants, and advice for early stage founders looking for non-dilutive funding.

Navigating grants in Canada is often a complex and time-consuming process. Outdated information, unclear eligibility criteria, and government jargon can make it difficult for any founder to even start.

And finding the right partner can be another challenge in itself. That’s how Stephanie Sang’s career took a turn. Growing up, she imagined herself working in corporate but became an entrepreneur after she kept getting recommended for support with grants. Sang started building the expertise when a company she worked for was transitioning into a new sector and the support that they brought in weren’t meeting expectations.

Now, the entrepreneur’s known as “Canada’s Grant Angel.” Her firm, Granted Consulting, has an over 92% success rate and has helped over 800 companies secure more than $100 million in funds—from hiring to training to market expansion and R&D. Sang has also been building her own platform, Get Granted, which will soon rename as Elivated. It aims to support more small- and medium-sized businesses with the same support they’d receive from a consultant. And its next version will tap into its nearly 15 years of data to not only match businesses with grants but suggest options like Spotify would with playlists.

“We understand that AI is being used a lot with grant writing right now, but a lot of it is slop because there are no grant databases out there,” highlights Sang. “The government doesn’t disclose this information and we only work on government grants [...] We have a database of about 18,000 applications. So we can build how we want the writeup to be done, what the voice of it is, and how much research needs to be done.”