Built for the founder who can't wait
Most SBIR consulting firms are full. The good ones build a reputation, the reputation brings clients, and eventually they're booked six months out. Founders who discover a solicitation with a four-week deadline call around and hear the same answer from firm after firm: "We'd love to help. We can fit you in next cycle." Next cycle is too late. That's the moment Covert Entity exists for.
Why we started
We started Covert Entity after watching too many serious technical founders get told to wait. Some of them were sitting on genuinely fundable science. Some had spent months reading SBIR.gov tutorials, drafting on their own, and second-guessing every section. All of them needed someone who could actually take them on — now, not next quarter — and write with them at the level the program demands.
The instinct behind the firm was simple: stay small on purpose, take on fewer clients than we could, and put senior attention on every proposal. Not because boutique sounds good in marketing copy — because it's the only way the work gets done right.
How we work
A limited roster. We cap how many active engagements we take at any one time. When you hire us, your proposal isn't number forty-seven in a queue. It gets the calendar space, the strategy time, and the writing care it actually needs to compete.
Senior expertise on every proposal. No handoffs to junior associates. No rotating account managers. The person you talk to in the kickoff call is the person working on your specific aims, your commercialization plan, and your innovation narrative.
Modern tools, faster cycles. We use current tooling — AI-assisted research, structured solicitation tracking, data-informed agency targeting — to compress timelines without cutting corners on quality. The technology accelerates the work. The judgment stays human, senior, and ours.
Honest fit calls. Not every project is right for us, and not every founder is right for SBIR. Our first conversation is about figuring out whether we can actually help you win — and if we can't, we'll tell you and point you toward someone who can.
What we believe
The SBIR/STTR program was designed to bridge the gap between brilliant research and fundable companies. It still does that — but the program today is faster, more competitive, and more commercialization-focused than it was even a decade ago. The founders winning now aren't necessarily the ones with the best science. They're the ones who can tell the right story to the right agency at the right moment, with a proposal that's tight, specific, and unmistakably ready.
That kind of proposal doesn't get written in spare hours between investor calls and lab work. It gets written by someone whose full attention is on it.
That's our job.