How we built Grantel.

The observation.

Every nonprofit we knew - from two-person community organisations to 50-person development teams - was running their grant operations on the same stack: Google Sheets, email threads, and someone's memory.

It worked, up to a point. But the spreadsheet that tracked 5 grants couldn't track 25. The email thread that coordinated one funder report couldn't coordinate eight. And when the person who "knew where everything was" went on leave, the system collapsed.

The question.

Why doesn't a proper tool exist for this? CRMs exist for sales teams. Project management tools exist for developers. But grant management - the operational core of every funded nonprofit - was still stuck in 2005.

The tools that did exist were either too generic to fit the way grants actually work, or they were enterprise platforms priced and designed for organisations many times the size of the teams who needed them most.

We thought: what if someone built this for the teams who actually do the work? Designed for a small development team at a mid-sized NGO. Simple enough to replace a spreadsheet in a week, structured enough to hold up when the organisation scales.

The build.

We started building in late 2025. Small team. No outside funding. The constraint was intentional - if we couldn't build something useful with limited resources, we had no business asking nonprofits to trust us with theirs.

We talked to grant managers, development officers, programme directors, and executive directors. We sat in their offices (and on their Zoom calls) and watched them work. We learned that the problem wasn't a lack of features - it was a lack of structure. The data existed; it just lived in twelve different places.

So we built the modules that mirror the actual grant lifecycle: Leads (who might fund us), Applications (what we've asked for), Partnerships (what we've agreed to), Programs (what we're delivering), and Reports (what we're reporting back). Each one connects to the others. Enter a funder once; see them everywhere.

The name.

Grantel - Grant Intel for Every Nonprofit. Intelligence about your grants, your funders, your pipeline, your programmes. Not artificial intelligence. The human kind: knowing what's happening, what's due, and what needs attention, without opening six tabs to find out.

Where we are now.

Grantel is live. Version 2.0 shipped in March 2026 with all modules, role-based access, Razorpay billing, and CSV export. We're working with a small group of design partners - social nonprofits who are using Grantel in production and shaping the product with us.

We're pre-revenue. We're pre-SOC 2. We're pre-most-things. But the product works, the data is secure (Postgres on Supabase, row-level security, encrypted at rest), and we're honest about what's ready and what's not.

If something is planned, we say planned. If something is a roadmap item, we say roadmap. We'd rather under-promise and over-deliver than the other way around.