Grant writing, reinvented with AI.
Write winning NIH, NSF, and foundation proposals faster. River drafts in your voice, keeps your facts straight, and never leaks your science.
Free to start · No credit card required
Grant deadlines do not care that you also run a lab. River is the AI workspace built for the people who actually have to ship the proposal — PIs, grants offices, foundation officers, and the freelance writers backing them up.
Drop your prior aims, the funder's RFA, and your CV. River drafts a specific aims page, fills the methods section in your voice, generates a budget narrative, and flags every place the funder's requirements don't match what you wrote.
What you get
AI chat inside the document
Ask for rewrites, clarifications, or summaries without switching windows. River reads your manuscript while it answers.
Real-time collaboration
Work with co-PIs, the grants office, and reviewers directly in the document with live cursors and version history.
Funder-specific templates
Start from pre-structured NIH (R01, R21, K-series), NSF, and major-foundation templates so you don't reformat from scratch.
Secure and private
Your science stays yours. Encrypted in transit and at rest, no training on your work, on-prem deployment available for sensitive labs.
Instant aims, summaries, and outlines
Generate aims, project descriptions, executive summaries, and review-ready paragraphs from your raw notes.
Stays in your voice
River preserves your tone, terminology, and institutional style. The proposal still sounds like you wrote it.
Outline to submission
- 1
Drop your inputs into one Space
The RFA, prior proposals, CV, preliminary data, and the funder's review criteria all live in one place.
- 2
Draft with an AI that reads the RFA
River cross-references every paragraph against the funder's requirements and flags missing pieces before reviewers do.
- 3
Polish, route, submit
Real-time edits with the grants office, version history, and clean exports to Word / PDF for the submission package.
Frequently asked questions
Will it actually write like a grant writer?
Yes. River uses models tuned for technical writing and grounds every paragraph in your actual lab inputs (CV, prior aims, RFA, preliminary data). It is not a generic chatbot dressed up as a proposal.
Is my unfunded science safe?
Yes. River does not train on your content, encrypts everything in transit and at rest, and supports on-prem deployment for labs that cannot use SaaS at all.
Does it know NIH and NSF formats?
Yes. Templates exist for R01, R21, K-series, NSF CAREER, NSF standard proposals, and major foundations. Page-limit and font-size guards run automatically.
Can the grants office and PIs work in the same document?
Yes. River supports real-time multiplayer editing with version history, comments, and suggested-edit mode — think Google Docs but with a built-in AI co-writer.