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May 29, 2025
Navigating Research Funding in Uncertain Times
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Yesterday, we hosted an exciting webinar to officially launch Atom 2.0, our next-generation AI-powered grant search platform. Co-founders Tomer du Sautoy (CEO) and Hamilton Evans (CTO) presented the major innovations and improvements that make Atom 2.0 a game-changer for researchers and research administrators seeking funding opportunities.
Finding the right grants remains one of the biggest hurdles in academic research. Traditional keyword-based searches often miss the context behind research projects, leading to irrelevant results or missed opportunities. With institutions increasingly emphasizing funding diversification, researchers need better tools to discover opportunities across federal, foundation, and industry sources.
Tomer du Sautoy brings a physics research background and startup experience as our CEO, while Hamilton Evans, our CTO, combines his chemistry PhD from Caltech with extensive tech development expertise. The duo met at Entrepreneur First incubator and pivoted from developer tools to addressing the critical challenges faced by researchers in grant discovery.
The heart of Atom 2.0 is its revolutionary semantic search engine. Unlike traditional keyword searches, researchers can now search using full sentences, paragraphs, or even paper abstracts. The AI understands context, delivering more relevant and nuanced results that truly match research interests.
Atom 2.0 includes improved filtering options and introduces intelligent tagging for grants with limited submissions. This feature is particularly valuable for research administrators who need to manage institutional applications and prevent duplicate submissions.
We've completely redesigned our grant pages based on user feedback. The new AI-powered curation processes full grant documents (web pages and PDFs) to extract and present key information more effectively, including specific funding amounts, award numbers, and critical requirements that were previously missed.
Our AI now compares researcher profiles directly to grant requirements, providing clear explanations of eligibility and identifying any missing qualifications. This saves researchers valuable time and helps them focus on the most viable opportunities.
The integrated chatbot allows users to ask specific questions about any grant, from application requirements to deadlines. With full context of the user's profile and the grant documents, it provides accurate, personalized responses.
Researchers can now create organized favorite lists based on research areas or team members. These lists can be made public for easy sharing while maintaining edit control, facilitating better collaboration within research teams.
Research administrators gain powerful oversight tools, including activity dashboards, usage analytics, and the ability to view and edit researcher profiles. Administrators can also see the platform from a researcher's perspective to understand the recommendations their faculty receive.
Atom 2.0 automatically sends weekly emails featuring newly listed grants, upcoming deadlines, and personalized suggestions based on individual research interests, keeping researchers informed without requiring active platform monitoring.
The development of Atom 2.0 required a complete technical overhaul. Instead of simply linking to external grant sources, we now process and store full grant documents, enabling our AI to reference comprehensive data and provide more accurate, detailed information.
We understand the research community's healthy skepticism about AI-generated content. Atom 2.0 addresses these concerns by providing AI with specific context from complete grant documents rather than relying on general knowledge. Our benchmarking shows significantly higher accuracy and minimal hallucinations compared to general AI models.
Atom 2.0 covers all funding types - federal, foundation, and industry sources. Federal grants are updated daily, foundation grants weekly, with new opportunities continuously added. All listings represent active funding opportunities, clearly flagged by funder type to help institutions route applications to the appropriate offices.
Atom is already adopted across numerous US institutions, with licensing typically based on institutional size and unlimited researcher accounts. We provide comprehensive onboarding sessions and maintain detailed documentation at docs.atomgrants.com.
We're committed to continuous innovation, with monthly webinars on AI in research administration and ongoing platform enhancements. Atom 3.0 is already in development, promising even more advanced features and capabilities.
During our extensive Q&A session, we addressed key questions about:
Interested in seeing how Atom 2.0 can help your institution discover more grants, increase funding success, and improve research team engagement? We encourage research administrators to book a demo to explore how our platform can transform your grant discovery process.
For demo requests and more information, (book here)[https://atomgrants.com/demo] or reach out to your research administration team to discuss institutional adoption.