You are about to sign a grant agreement or a term sheet and the IP clause sits three pages in, written in the same flat tone as the reporting schedule. That is the page that decides who owns what you build, and it does not say the same thing twice across funder types. Equity programmes take a slice of the company and usually leave the IP alone. Public grants rarely take equity but attach conditions on how you exploit and sometimes publish what you build. Institutional routes may mean you never owned the IP in the first place. Read for which one you are in before you read anything else.
Public grants: no equity, but strings on exploitation and publication
Advanced Industries Accelerator Grants from Colorado OEDIT pay up to $250,000 depending on grant type, and the next application opens January 4, 2027. State economic development money like this is typically conditioned on commercialising within the state and reporting progress on a schedule, which is a real constraint on how freely you can license or sell the underlying technology later. The Arkansas Business and Technology Accelerator Grant Program runs the same way: up to $250,000 at the program level, with $50,000 to $100,000 available as an SBIR match, tied to federal milestone reporting that effectively tells you what counts as a deliverable.
Launch Minnesota Innovation Grants, run by Minnesota DEED, max out at $50,000 and carry the same kind of reporting obligation on a smaller scale. The SCRA Startup & Acceleration Grants from the South Carolina Research Authority go up to $25,000 at the Startup stage and $50,000 at Acceleration, on a rolling basis, and are explicitly non-dilutive. Non-dilutive means no shares change hands, not that there are no conditions. Read the exploitation clause anyway: it usually specifies where and how you are allowed to commercialise, and some state programmes expect in-state operations to continue for a defined period after the grant closes.
The FSF Accelerator Grant from the Fashion Scholarship Fund pays $50,000, and sector-specific funds like this one often require you to let the organiser publish your work as a case study, which is a publication condition in every meaningful sense even if the agreement never uses that word. Ask directly whether the funder can publish your technical detail before you have filed anything you want protected.
Protocol and foundation grants: milestone money, rarely equity, but check what counts as a deliverable
Trailblazer 2.0 from the Arbitrum Foundation puts $1M total behind agentic DeFi builders, capped at $10k per submission, released against milestones rather than equity. Base Builder Grants pay 1 to 5 ETH the same way. SSV Network Grants Program has $5M to allocate, and BNB Chain Grants go up to USD 200K per project. None of these take a share of your company. What they often do take is a requirement that the funded code ships as a public repository as the deliverable itself, which is a publication condition wearing a different name.
Starknet Seed Grants pay up to $25,000 in STRK with no deadline, reviewed in rounds on a rolling basis. The Graph grants program does not publish a fixed amount, it funds from a community treasury, and there are no open RFPs at this time. Flare Grants Program also does not publish a set figure, releasing funds per milestone under a grant agreement. Across all of these, the agreement is the thing that defines the milestone, so negotiate that definition before you sign, not after you have built past it.
Equity programmes: they take shares, not your code
Programmes that take equity in exchange for cash and support almost never ask for IP assignment to the investor. They ask for shares, usually through a SAFE or a priced round, and the invention stays with the company that built it. The clause worth checking here is founder IP assignment into the company itself, not into the investor, before the round closes. If a co-founder wrote the original code before incorporation and never formally assigned it to the company, the cap table is clean but the IP underneath it is not, and that gap surfaces exactly when a later investor's lawyer reads the data room.
Institutional routes: the employer or university may already own the result
If what you are commercialising was built on university equipment, in a university lab, or during paid employment, there is a real chance the institution already owns it under a standard employment or student IP policy, regardless of what any later grant agreement says. Programmes like the Colorado OEDIT accelerator grants and the SCRA awards both expect the applicant to confirm clean title to the IP being commercialised before they release funds, and a funder discovering a prior institutional claim mid-process is the single most common reason a disbursement stalls. Get a written release or license from the employer or university before you apply, not after a programme asks for it.
What to read before you sign
- The definition of background IP versus foreground IP, and whether anything you bring in gets swept into the agreement by accident
- The exploitation clause: does it restrict where, how, or for how long you can commercialise after the grant closes
- Whether the deliverable is defined as a public repository or open-source release, which functions as a publication requirement
- Whether the agreement assigns IP or only licenses it, and to whom
- Confirmation of clean title: has any employer, university, or prior funder already claimed a stake in what you are submitting
What to negotiate
- Narrow a broad exploitation clause to the specific field or geography you actually operate in
- Ask for a delay on any publication or open-source requirement if a patent filing is in progress
- Push milestone definitions toward a working deliverable rather than a mandatory public release, where the funder allows it
- Get the employer or university release in writing before the application goes in, not as a condition attached after the money is approved
None of this is a reason to avoid any of these programmes. $1M from Arbitrum, $5M from SSV Network, or $250,000 from Colorado OEDIT are real money on real terms. The only mistake is signing before you know which of the three boxes you are in.