Tools
Cal Hacks 13.0 · Oct 2026
Grant Test Auto
- Researchers lose almost half their time to grant paperwork: obscure funding rules (no supplies in a grant's last 90 days), grants frozen without warning, and official records that disagree on a grant's status
- AI agents do the tedious checking on every purchase and invoice, and a person approves each one
About
Built at Cal Hacks 13.0 for the Hyphenate track, after our PI talked at lab meeting about how much of his time goes to keeping funding instead of research. Since 2025, a grant can be canceled, restored by a court, and still not pay a cent, and the official records don't agree on which is true. On top of that, every purchase has to clear obscure funding rules, like no supplies bought in a grant's last 90 days, and someone has to check all of it by hand, constantly. Grant Test Auto automates that grunt work. It sits between a lab's researchers and its grant office: researchers ask for things in plain words, agents check each request and invoice against the grant's real balance and every spending rule, and one human grant manager approves each one with the reasons in front of them. "Awarded," "restored" and "paid" are three different facts, so a court order alone doesn't unfreeze a grant; only money actually arriving does. Claude reads and explains but never decides, since the rules live in the database where no model can talk its way past them. Worked on the backend, feature ideation and market research. Tested only on real cases: caught 38 of 38 freezes on 37 NIH grants and flagged 28 of 28 unallowable items from real audits.
- TypeScript
- SpacetimeDB
- React
- Claude
- Apify