143: Free Money and Funding Your Startup with Sedale Turbovsky

In this week’s Immigration Law for Tech Startups podcast, I’m joined by Sedale Turbovsky, the CEO of OpenGrants, a company that makes grants and public funding more equitable, accessible, and transparent, especially for businesses and early-stage startups.

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If you’re an international founder, whether in the U.S. or outside, and looking for startup funding in the U.S., there are various options available, even coming from for-profit entities. Now, this can all tie into becoming more qualified for an O-1 visa, an EB-1 visa, a green card for extraordinary ability, or an EB-2 National Interest Waiver green card.

Grant funding, also known as free money, usually doesn’t require a repayment, nor is the ownership of your company going to be reduced. That being said, there are certain conditions you need to be aware of before going down this route. While grant funding is abundant, in terms of utility, it is not easy to use for a lot of different reasons.

For the purpose of this discussion, this episode focuses on the U.S. landscape since the grant funding ecosystem in the United States functions differently than the grant funding ecosystem in other places and around the world.

In this episode, you’ll hear about:

Why OpenGrants was created
What is a grant: scope, timeline, how to be grant-ready
Venture capital vs. grant funding
The main buckets of impact for grant funding
Avenues for grant funding

Don’t miss my upcoming conversations with top Silicon Valley venture capitalists, startup founders, professors, futurists, and thought leaders on Immigration Law for Tech Startups. Subscribe to this podcast here or on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or whatever your favorite platform is. As always, we welcome your rating and review of this podcast. We appreciate your feedback!