Startup Funding Architect

The Problem: Startups miss out on billions in non-dilutive federal funding every year—not because they aren't eligible, but because the process is broken. The search is fragmented, pitch writing is time-consuming, and deadlines are unforgiving. Founders need an autonomous partner, not just a search bar. The Solution: Startup Funding Architect is a production-grade Agentic AI solution built on IBM watsonx Orchestrate. It replaces the manual grant application lifecycle with a seamless, conversational workflow that moves from discovery to execution in under 60 seconds. Technical Architecture: We bypassed simple prototyping to build a resilient, enterprise-ready architecture: The Brain: An IBM watsonx Orchestrate Agent configured with a ReAct persona to reason through complex, multi-step user intents. The Muscle: A custom Microservices Context Protocol (MCP) Server built with Python 3.11 and FastAPI. The Intelligence: Integrated Google Gemini 1.5 (via the modern Google GenAI SDK) to power the "Triple-Horizon" pitch generation framework. The Infrastructure: Fully containerized (Docker) for reliability.Key Features: Resilient Grant Hunting: A custom scraping engine that queries the Grants.gov API with a 5x Exponential Backoff Retry Policy, ensuring data capture even during government server instability. Triple-Horizon Pitch Architecture: The agent doesn't just write text; it adheres to a strict prompt framework (Acute Pain Point, Technical Deviation, Strategic Lock) to maximize scoring potential against federal criteria. Proactive Execution: The agent anticipates user needs, automatically locking submission deadlines in Google Calendar and drafting emails in Gmail via secure, ephemeral OAuth token handling. Why This Matters: We didn't just build a chatbot; we built a workflow automator. By combining the orchestration power of watsonx with the speed of a hardened microservice, Startup Funding Architect proves that AI agents can be trusted with critical business operations.