ISA · Intellectual Search Agent · the grant-lifecycle platform

Win the grants your work deserves.

Most grant software stops at a searchable list. ISA Research runs the whole race: it finds live federal opportunities, scores your real fit honestly, drafts agency-aware proposals with you, builds a Uniform-Guidance-correct budget, tracks every submission requirement as a checkmark — and prints the finished application package.

Live federal opportunity feed 6-component capability-match engine 7-criterion go / no-go rubric 2 CFR 200-aware budget engine Print-perfect submission package
How it works

One lifecycle, from first search to submitted package

Seven stages, one workspace. Every stage feeds the next — nothing is retyped, nothing is lost between tools.

Discover

Search the live federal opportunity feed (the public Grants.gov API) without leaving the app — agency, program, deadline, and award size at a glance, with your pipeline one click away.

Match

The Forge Match engine scores every opportunity against your organization's real capability profile — six weighted components covering topical coverage, maturity, eligibility, award size, runway to deadline, and application burden.

Decide

A seven-criterion go / no-go rubric — mission fit, competitiveness, capacity, financials, timeline, relationships, burden — produces an evidence-cited recommendation. Conditional-go and no-go are real answers, not failure states.

Draft

The proposal workspace opens with agency-aware section templates (NSF, NIH, U.S. Dept. of Education, and a generic federal set). AI scaffolds each narrative section from your capability profile; you edit, it never submits anything on its own.

Budget

A budget builder that knows the Uniform Guidance (2 CFR 200): modified total direct costs, indirect rates and the de-minimis option, and dollar thresholds resolved by award vintage. It lints your budget before a federal reviewer does.

Track

AI reads the funding notice and turns it into a requirements checklist — every form, attachment, and certification as a trackable checkmark with an audit trail. On award, a compliance calendar generates the RPPR, FFR, and effort-certification deadlines for the whole period of performance.

Package

One click produces the submission package: cover page, table of contents, narrative sections, multi-year budget with rollups, and the requirements checklist — print-perfect, and stamped DRAFT until every required checkmark is complete.

Features

Everything a research office does, in one place

Built as a module of the Luca AI Express platform — same account, same design language, same data fabric as the rest of the Luca family.

Live opportunity discovery

Search current federal funding opportunities in-app via the public Grants.gov API — no scraping, no stale mirrors — and save them straight into your pipeline.

Capability profile & Forge Match

Describe what your organization actually does once; the match engine scores every opportunity against it with IDF-weighted term coverage and graded — never binary — eligibility.

Honest go / no-go scoring

Seven weighted criteria, an eligibility gate, and thresholds that produce go, conditional-go, or no-go — each with per-criterion rationale and cited evidence you can defend to a board.

Proposal workspace

Sections with statuses and a state machine from draft to submitted; AI scaffolds each section from your profile and the opportunity, and every word stays yours to edit.

Uniform-Guidance budget engine

Multi-year budget lines with justifications, automatic MTDC and indirect rollups, and lint rules for the 2 CFR 200 thresholds that actually apply to your award's vintage.

Requirements & NOFO parsing

Paste or attach the funding notice; AI extracts the submission requirements into a deduplicated checklist with owner and timestamp on every completed item.

Compliance calendar

From the award start date, the platform generates the reporting calendar — progress reports, federal financial reports, effort certifications, closeout — so nothing surfaces as a surprise.

Submission package

A print-first application document — cover, contents, narratives, budget tables, checklist — rendered from live data, ready for File → Save as PDF.

Research corpus & notes

A living research library — models, hardware, methods, datasets — plus PhD-style research notes with tags and cross-references, feeding the same workspace your proposals live in.

The match engine

Scores you can defend, not scores that flatter

Forge Match is a versioned, deterministic engine — the same inputs always produce the same score, and every score decomposes into its components.

Six weighted components

Each opportunity is scored 0–100 against your capability profile:

Capability coverage
40
Award-size fit
15
Eligibility (graded)
15
Runway to deadline
12
Capability maturity
10
Application burden
8
Designed to stay honest: one single hard gate (an expired deadline), graded caps instead of silent zeros, and an AI screening pass that can only subtract points — and only when it quotes the funding notice verbatim as evidence. The engine version ships with every score, so a score from last quarter is never confused with one from today.
GO ≥ 75

Strong fit — commit resources and draft.

CONDITIONAL 65–74

Fundable with named gaps — partner, pilot, or descope first.

NO-GO < 65

An honest no — with the exact reasons, so next cycle you can change them.

Integrity

Your research is yours. Full stop.

ISA Research was built under a strict data-isolation policy — sharing is an explicit act by the owner, never a default.

Per-user isolation

Every note, proposal, capability, and score belongs to one user. There is no org-wide pool, no ambient visibility, no leak path between accounts — isolation is enforced in every query, not in the UI.

Explicit, bounded sharing

Owners grant named collaborators exactly three possible rights — read, write, change. Delete is structurally ungrantable: the system has no way to give it away. Only the owner can revoke.

Frontier-model reasoning

Every AI feature — NOFO parsing, section scaffolds, deep pre-submission review, match screening — runs on frontier-class Claude models through the platform's governed AI bridge.

Honest by design

The platform will tell you no. Scores that flatter cost you staff-months on unwinnable applications; scores you can defend build a funding strategy. We chose the second.

Who it's for

Built for the people who write the grants

Schools & districts

Federal education programs, ESSA evidence tiers, and EDGAR-formatted applications — with the compliance calendar your business office will thank you for.

Universities & research offices

NSF and NIH template sets, effort certification tracking, and honest competitiveness scoring across a whole opportunity pipeline.

Nonprofits & institutes

Capability-matched discovery so a small development team spends its hours only on opportunities it can actually win.

R&D teams

A research corpus, PhD-style notes, and a proposal factory in one workspace — from literature to funded project.

Offers · Gus IT Research Institution

Run the system yourself — or let us run the research

Research services are delivered by Gus IT Research Institution, operated by Gus IT LLC. Our focus areas: AI tooling · small LLMs · fine-tuning · AI long-term memory · advanced workflows — the same discipline that built the Luca AI Express platform. Founding-cohort pricing, locked in writing.

Founding cohort

ISA Platform

$149/mo
per organization · billed annually ($189 month-to-month) · up to 5 seats

The full grant-lifecycle system, self-serve: your team runs discovery, scoring, drafting, budgets, checklists, and packages.

  • Live federal discovery + honest match scoring
  • AI drafting, 2 CFR 200 budget engine, submission package
  • AI assistant over your whole workspace
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Done for you

Grant Services

from $1,750
per foundation proposal · federal applications from $4,500 · discovery retainer $1,250/mo

We run your grant lifecycle on ISA — pipeline, go/no-go boards, narratives, compliant budgets, and the finished package. You review and sign.

  • Flat fees scoped in writing before work begins
  • One revision round + requirements checklist included
  • Retainer clients get the platform included
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By the hour

Research Consulting

$250/hr
senior researchers · tools included · documented in your own codex

Hire our researchers directly on your problems: architecture reviews, feasibility studies, prototypes, and co-authored studies across AI tooling, small LLMs, fine-tuning, long-term memory, and advanced workflows.

  • Work sessions with the ISA/Luca tooling included
  • Every engagement leaves executable documentation behind
  • Read our methods first — see the Research library
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Research & IP

Contract AI Research

from $4,500
per engagement · flat-fee, scoped deliverables

We do the research — AI, machine learning, tooling — and you own the resulting IP. Or license Gus IT's own research and tooling IP for your organization.

  • Your IP: contract research with full assignment
  • Our IP: lease the Gus IT research & tooling portfolio
  • Cited, reviewable deliverables — never a black box
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Our ethics, in writing: no percentage-of-award, contingency, or finder's fees — ever (GPA & AFP Codes of Ethics). Fees are fixed before submission, regardless of outcome. Funding is never guaranteed and match scores are advisory. Proposal-writing costs are generally not chargeable to a federal award — plan them from operating funds.

Get early access

ISA Research is rolling out in cohorts. Leave your email and we'll reach out with access details and onboarding for your organization.

Prefer to talk? Call +1 (888) 450-6323Isabella, our research advisor, answers.