Ann Arbor software company
InfoReady recently earned its fifth spot on the prestigious
Inc. 5000 list of America's fastest-growing private enterprises. InfoReady is a leading provider of online solutions that automate internal competition and proposal review processes. Its products are used by 20 of the top 30 universities in the U.S., as ranked by U.S. News and World Report, to manage competitive grant processes.
"What started right here has truly become a more national phenomenon, so to speak," says Bhushan Kulkarni, founder and CEO of InfoReady. "Pretty much a
'Who's Who'
of universities are using InfoReady … from Johns Hopkins to Stanford, Columbia, and the University of Michigan."
The Inc. 5000 list hones in on companies that have demonstrated rapid revenue growth and shown business resilience along the way. The average median three-year revenue growth rate among the companies featured on the 2024 list was over 2,000%. Kulkarni's company currently boasts almost 65% market share of the largest research universities and almost 75% of Ivy League schools.
"Every year we kind of feel that we're not growing fast enough," Kulkarni says. "And then when the ranking comes out, it becomes a really good morale booster for the entire team to see that our hard work is really paying off."
Kulkarni shares that InfoReady took shape when his team was working with the University of Michigan (U-M) to create a platform for "limited submissions grants." He explains that federal agencies have numerous unique grant opportunities requiring universities and research institutions to compete with each other. Usually the agencies want only one proposal to be submitted by each university or research institution. At U-M there are numerous faculty members who are interested in seeking these grants to fund research.
When Kulkarni started collaborating with U-M, the university was running internal competitions manually and publishing them to different research departments on multiple websites. Faculty and staff would then collect the applications through methods such as PDF, Dropbox, or Google Docs. Then they would route them for both internal and external review so they could objectively decide on the best idea to submit. Now, thanks to the InfoReady platform, they are able to seamlessly streamline a diverse range of selection and approval procedures.
"When I started looking at how other universities were managing the same issue, I found that they were also doing it manually and cobbling together processes," Kulkarni says. "Long story short, we are now actually a platform of choice in higher education for deciding which ideas, and which people, rise to the top."
Kulkarni's team engaged six universities as clients in their first year, 17 by their second year, and 100 universities by their third year. Looking at his company's projections, Kulkarni is expecting to be on next year's Inc. 5000 list and the one after that.
"InfoReady can go beyond university research departments. There are other departments that have to manage competitions and funding approvals," he says. "In the next three to five years we expect to widen our footprint across the campuses of the universities that are working with us."
Jaishree Drepaul is a writer and editor based in Ann Arbor. She can be reached at jaishreeedit@gmail.com.
Photo courtesy of InfoReady.
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