Hi, I’m Ben.

The truth

I used to lead nonprofit initiatives and fundraising, just like you. I’m a former ED, finance director, and grant writer. Let me guess — you need more funding, but don’t want to hire more. You're competitive and trying to keep up with technology, while juggling transitions in your funding and team.

I started building GrantLoop for my own needs, and now, it’s designed for those same smaller, hungrier nonprofits, not big, sluggish ones.

It delivers what you actually want: 1) more qualified grant opportunities than you could ever find manually with a database and 2) completely written applications with minimal editing required (industry-leading low hallucination rate)

I'm one person with a laptop. I know this sounds iffy. A solo founder building AI for nonprofits? Can I really support an entire platform myself? Honestly, it remains to be seen.

Why might want to work with me:

  1. Direct access. You'll work with me personally, not get passed to salespeople.

  2. No investor pressure. I make decisions based on what helps nonprofits win grants, not what satisfies quarterly reports.

  3. Genuine urgency. Your success directly determines whether I eat. I answer every email personally—even angry ones.

Why you might want to work with someone else:

  1. If your annual budget is below $1M or above $20M, we might not be the best fit right now.

  2. If you already have a dedicated AI specialist on your development team.

  3. If your processes are optimized for working with established vendors rather than emerging solutions.

Benjamin Yao, ben@grantloop.com

Founder & CEO

Advisors

(Basically all of my closest, nerdy friends)

Benjamin Yao

Founder + CEO

Former ED, nonprofit consultant, and grant writer. Dork about cooking and avid about the outdoors.

Siddharth Parambi

Data Science Advisor

Ex-Harvard, software engineer & data scientist. Passionate about education. Loves rock climbing.

Elena Grajales

Design Advisor

Ex-UPenn. Life-long vinyl enthusiast and proud member of the Film Society.

Srikar Pamidimukkala

Data Science Advisor

Ex-Georgia Tech. Loves a good game of D&D. Practitioner of loving-kindness meditation.

Erik Zhang

Software dvisor

Ex-UPenn M&T, software engineer. Lover of technology and AI systems.

Jason Zhang

Algorithms Advisor

Stanford machine learning researcher. Nonprofit-founder. Loves a good game of tennis.

Integrity first

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Dream big

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Build fast

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Integrity first 〰️ Dream big 〰️ Build fast 〰️

Build the future with us:

Follow passion

〰️

Deliver brilliance

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Follow passion 〰️ Deliver brilliance 〰️

Tenets

  • We're taking a gamble on honesty—the radical belief that business can be done differently. When other companies hire more salespeople, we hire more engineers.

    We refuse to hold clients hostage with annual contracts—instead, we offer a 6-month money-back guarantee. Not because we're nice, but because we're confident. Our customers are smart enough to recognize value without the high-pressure tactics.

    Think about it: if a company won't let you walk away, they're probably afraid you will.

  • Sales pitches are short-lived; trusted relationships endure. We build momentum through consistent results, not persistent pitches. When nonprofits secure doubled funding and immediately tell their networks, that's our marketing department in action. When organizations succeed beyond their expectations and stake their reputation on referrals, that's true momentum.

    Building trust isn't just ethical—it's efficient. To hell with sales and marketing. Customer love is our growth strategy.

  • Complex software isn't a badge of honor—it's a failure of design. The hardest part of creating great software isn't adding features—it's knowing what to leave out. While others build "comprehensive solutions" littered with half-baked features, we create tools nonprofits can master without endless training. Our tech isn't just impressive because of what it offers, but because of what it omits: confusion, complexity, and wasted time.

    We build only what matters: tools that maximize grants while minimizing effort, and nothing else. After all, the most powerful tool is the kind your team actually uses.

  • We're probably more paranoid about privacy than our users are. By rejecting outside investment and its demands for growth at all costs, we've maintained our independence to choose the right path over the most profitable one. We don't sell information or use it to target ads.

    We see privacy as an obsession, not an obligation—right down to constructing a new, separate database for each nonprofit we partner with.

  • We build what nonprofits with small-to-midsize teams ($1-20M budgets) actually need: AI that wins more grants with less effort. Not because AI is the next big thing, but because we've been in their shoes.

    We’re former ED’s and development directors, and keep our part-time roles as grant writers and board members to stay close to our roots.