FreeWill has acquired GrantAssistant, an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven platform designed to provide nonprofits and international development organizations with a proposal workflow toolkit that streamlines the grant application process.

Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. GrantAssistant’s full team, located in Washington, D.C. and Lahore, Pakistan, become part of FreeWill, whose employee footprint for the first time will span beyond the United States.

GrantAssistant was launched intending to leverage technology to create better grant proposals in one-third of the time by melding specialty skills via AI. GrantAssistant has a process where organizations can generate summaries of requests for proposals (RFPs), use templates to generate proposal structure, brainstorm and integrate program ideas, generate accurate and relevant content, and conduct a comprehensive compliance review before submitting their proposals.

“Grant Assistant is a vertical application built on top of industry leading AI technologies but really we are workflow focused,” said Mustafa Hasnain, founder and CEO of GrantAssistant. The beta version was started during early 2023 and the 1.0 version launched in April of this year.

According to the National Council of Nonprofits, roughly one-third of total funding for all nonprofits is from government grants and contracts, and according to the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University, another $100 billion in annual charitable funding derives from grant-making made by private foundations.

“We are over the moon to welcome GrantAssistant into the FreeWill family,” said Patrick Schmitt, co-CEO and co-founder of FreeWill. “GrantAssistant is a truly innovative platform that fits perfectly within our long-term vision and our customers given previews of its capabilities in action have been absolutely blown away.”

“When we started GrantAssistant, our goal was to help nonprofits and non-governmental organizations get as much funding as possible by making the grant writing process easier,” said Hasnain. “Our relationship blossomed as we realized that merging could be a force multiplier for us, and a win for society. We couldn’t be happier.”

FreeWill, a New York City-based public benefit company that is mostly remote, was launched in 2017 and generates income from subscriptions from nonprofits. Schmitt said there have been opportunities to grow via acquisition. It is a Series B funding round with the latest infusion of $30 million in March 2022. It is backed by Bain Capital’s impact fund, as well as several venture capital firms including HearstLab.

FreeWill has generated more than $10 billion in planned and real-time gifts for more than 10,000 nonprofits while helping more than 1 million consumers create wills and plan their estates, according to Schmitt.

The concept of this acquisition and future growth, both Schmitt and Hasnain emphasized, is pushing financial resources to nonprofits. “We resisted some of the expansion because we haven’t seen things that are an enormous leap forward in the way we believe the original FreeWill idea was and we think that Grant Assistant is an enormous leap forward,” said Schmitt.

The post FreeWill Acquires AI-Driven GrantAssistant appeared first on The NonProfit Times.

Source From Non Profit Times