# Proposal Compliance Scrubbing for Universities

*/Opportunities/Proposal_Compliance_Scrubbing_for_Universities*

## Opportunity Market Sizing

_Illustrative — target and order-of-magnitude estimate figures, not an achieved track record (this Thing is concept-stage)._

**S A M**: ~$60M-$90M English-speaking R1 and R2 universities and research hospitals
**S O M**: ~$5M-$15M
**T A M**: ~5,000 global research-active universities and institutes × ~$50,000/yr ≈ ~$250M
**Growth Rate**: ~8-12%/yr, driven by rising federal grant application volumes and continuously shifting NSF/NIH compliance mandates
**Paid Comparable Spend**: ~$50,000-$150,000/yr in fractional labor costs for pre-award specialists and research administrators manually verifying agency guidelines

## Opportunity Incumbents

- [Cayuse Proposals](/Products/Cayuse_Proposals) — Tool
- [Huron Research Suite](/Products/Huron_Research_Suite) — Tool
- [Kuali Research](/Products/Kuali_Research) — Tool
- [InfoEd Global](/Products/InfoEd_Global) — Tool
- [Hanover Research](/Products/Hanover_Research) — Service
- [Internal Pre-Award Office](/Products/Internal_Pre-Award_Office) — Service
- [Excel Compliance Checklists](/Products/Excel_Compliance_Checklists) — Spreadsheet
- [Manual Document Review](/Products/Manual_Document_Review) — DIY

## Opportunity Win Conditions

**Kill Thresholds**:
- Zero pilots converted to paid annual contracts >$30k after 120 days
- Human verification overrides system flags >20% of the time
- Setup time to ingest a new federal solicitation takes >2 hours
- W1 to W4 user retention drops below 40%
**Leading Metrics**:
- Time spent resolving formatting and compliance errors per proposal
- System-flagged versus human-flagged error ratio
- Volume of solicitations parsed per week per institution
- Pre-award specialist active usage days per week
**What Proves Right**: Pre-award specialists process at least four grant proposals per week through the system, completely replacing their manual checklist workflows. Institutional pilot users maintain a 90 percent or higher acceptance rate of system-flagged compliance violations. Early adopters sign minimum $30,000 annual contracts within 90 days of initial deployment.
**What Proves Wrong**: Research administrators perform redundant manual line-by-line reviews because they do not trust the automated checks. Procurement offices block adoption because they mandate bundling with existing Huron or Cayuse enterprise suites. The labor required to configure specific NSF or NIH solicitation rules takes longer than the manual review itself.

## Neighborhood

### Incumbent in

- [Cayuse Proposals](/Products/Cayuse_Proposals) — incumbent in · Products
- [Excel Compliance Checklists](/Products/Excel_Compliance_Checklists) — incumbent in · Products
- [Hanover Research](/Products/Hanover_Research) — incumbent in · Products
- [Huron Research Suite](/Products/Huron_Research_Suite) — incumbent in · Products
- [InfoEd Global](/Products/InfoEd_Global) — incumbent in · Products
- [Internal Pre-Award Office](/Products/Internal_Pre-Award_Office) — incumbent in · Products
- [Kuali Research](/Products/Kuali_Research) — incumbent in · Products
- [Manual Document Review](/Products/Manual_Document_Review) — incumbent in · Products