Questions & answers

Cairn, the federal capture platform, is software for U.S. federal contractors and grant seekers. It scans SAM.gov, Grants.gov, and USAspending for open opportunities, scores each notice against your company's capability profile — NAICS codes, past performance, and capabilities narrative — and moves qualified pursuits through a disciplined capture pipeline. Its AI capture assistant drafts proposals in your company's own voice, tears solicitations into compliance checklists, and flags requirements before deadlines.

It is built for small and mid-size businesses pursuing U.S. federal contracts and grants — capture managers, proposal writers, and business-development leads who would otherwise track opportunities in spreadsheets or scroll SAM.gov by hand. It is not a general project-management or CRM tool; it is purpose-built for the federal opportunity-to-award lifecycle.

Cairn reads contract opportunities from SAM.gov and grant funding opportunities from Grants.gov. One search covers both registries, and you choose which of them to include. Award data comes from a third public system, USAspending, which is what powers Recompete Radar.

Results from both registries are merged and de-duplicated, so a notice that appears in more than one place is shown once, keeping its highest fit score. Each result carries a badge for where it came from, and clicking the title opens the official notice at its source. Cairn aggregates and scores public federal data; it does not originate procurement or grant listings.

Every opportunity carries a fit score from 0 to 100 describing how well the notice matches your company profile — your NAICS and PSC codes, the set-aside certifications you hold, your target agencies, and your capability narrative — and you can ask the built-in AI assistant to explain any score.

Treat it as triage rather than a verdict: it tells you what to read first. Results you cannot bid are greyed but kept visible, and a high-fit notice your certifications bar you from gets an explicit Ineligible flag, so a strong score never nudges you toward work you are not permitted to win.

Your company profile is the real prerequisite, because almost everything else in the product scores against it. Enter your UEI and use Autofill from SAM.gov to pull your legal name, CAGE code, address, NAICS and PSC codes, set-aside certifications, and registration status — importing your SAM.gov profile takes under two minutes. Then add what SAM.gov does not know about you: your target agencies, typical contract size, and a capability narrative, which the AI can draft a first version of from your website or a capability statement.

One thing to plan for: opportunity search runs on a SAM.gov API key, and new accounts borrow a shared starter key so setup works immediately. Once that period ends, search and saved-search alerts need a key of your own, requested from your SAM.gov account details page. Filling in your company profile from SAM.gov keeps working either way.

Yes — there is a free Starter plan, and it covers fit-ranked search and a disciplined pipeline. Professional is $99 a month, or $990 a year, and adds the full AI capture and authoring toolkit. Enterprise is unlimited usage with priority support and automated submission, and is priced by quote. Current prices are always shown live in the pricing section of the home page.

A higher plan unlocks more features and raises every usage limit — searches per day, AI assistant messages, seats, past-performance records, and active pursuits. A feature outside your plan is shown locked rather than hidden, so you can see what exists before deciding whether to pay for it, and upgrading unlocks it right away with your existing data and pipeline untouched.

Yes. You list the set-aside certifications you hold — 8(a), WOSB, HUBZone, SDVOSB, and so on — on your company profile, and fit ranking uses them to surface set-aside work you can actually bid. Opportunity search also carries a set-aside filter covering Total Small Business, 8(a), WOSB, SDVOSB, and HUBZone competitions, and autofill sets your certifications from your SAM.gov registration.

One limit is worth knowing up front: the set-aside filter, like NAICS and place of performance, only narrows SAM.gov contract results. Grants.gov opportunities do not carry those fields, so they are matched on your keywords alone.

Yes. One search covers both federal registries — contract opportunities from SAM.gov and grant funding opportunities from Grants.gov — and the results are merged, de-duplicated, and badged with the source each came from. Your organization type on the company profile (small business, nonprofit, state or local government, tribal, higher education, and so on) is what determines which grants you are eligible for, because Grants.gov restricts many funding opportunities to specific applicant types.

Grants do behave differently in two places. The structured filters — NAICS, set-aside, and place of performance — only narrow SAM.gov results, so Grants.gov opportunities are matched on your keywords alone. And estimated value means the funding ceiling for a grant, the most a single award can be, rather than the government's estimated total value of the work.

No. The assistant never changes your data on its own. Any time it wants to add, update, or delete something, it pauses and lists each proposed action, and nothing runs until you approve it — decline anything you do not want and only what you approved is carried out. Steps that merely read data run on their own; anything that changes your data waits for you.

Longer multi-step AI workflows work the same way: a flow pauses at a human-in-the-loop checkpoint where nothing downstream runs until you approve it, and you can correct what the flow proposed before letting it continue. AI output can be wrong or incomplete; it is a drafting aid, and every submission remains yours to review, correct, and approve.

No. When you use an AI feature, the relevant content — your prompt, the pursuit context, and the documents you have grounded the work on — is sent to the AI provider serving that feature so it can generate a response. We select providers whose terms prohibit using content submitted through our account to train their general-purpose models.

The pursuits, proposals, review comments, library content, and documents you upload are yours; we process them to operate the product for you. We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it with third parties for their own marketing.

Information is encrypted in transit, access is limited to the people who need it to run the service, and each organization's data is separated by tenant. The credentials you hand us — your EIN, your SAM.gov API key, your Grants.gov submission certificate — are encrypted in our database; your pursuits, proposals, and uploaded documents are held on access-controlled servers rather than encrypted field by field. Sign-in supports two-factor authentication and passkeys, and for those we store only what is needed to verify them — never a reusable secret you gave us in plain text. Card details go to our payment processor and are never stored by Cairn, and we do not sell your personal information.

No system is perfectly secure, so part of it is on you: use a strong, unique password, turn on two-factor authentication, and remove teammates who no longer need access.

Cairn is built around a shared pipeline: pursuits belong to your company rather than to one person, and seats come with your plan — one on Starter, ten on Professional, unlimited on Enterprise. Seats are a hard cap, so inviting more teammates than your plan allows means upgrading first.

There is also a Cairn app for iPhone, included with your account with nothing extra to buy. It carries your ranked matches, live pipeline stages, and deadline alerts, and it signs in with the same account, so every pursuit, score, and due date stays in step with the web app.

No. Cairn is an independent commercial product. It is not affiliated with, or endorsed by, the U.S. Government or any federal agency.

Cairn retrieves opportunity, award, and entity information from public U.S. Government systems including SAM.gov, Grants.gov, and USAspending.gov. That information is public record, and clicking a result's title opens the official notice at its source, so you always respond to the government's own posting rather than to our copy of it.