WIMTACH partners with Upgraded Inc., to improve their grant and proposal development process

With the renewal of a partnership and a Mitacs funded internship, WIMTACH and Upgraded Inc., have demonstrated that the work of Centennial College Student Researchers can truly make a difference for businesses. The Vancouver based company which is dedicated to supporting software, hardware, and venture backed startups with resource acquisition from tax credits to savings and grants, connected with WIMTACH to gain support in streamlining and enhancing their customer success business processes.

Owing to the funding opportunity provided by Mitacs in a business strategy internship, the Upgraded team have noted that they have already been able to establish the foundation for useful results. Their team has been able to innovate their system for integrating Artificial Intelligence into their development process for preparing grants and proposals for their clients.

Growth Strategist Haris Raheel and Head of Client Earnings Will Richman, have explained that the opportunity to work with several WIMTACH Student Researchers and particularly, project management intern Ercan Erdogan has paved the way for this success. Will noted that he was certain that Ercan was the right intern for the role because of Ercan’s professional background and because of his status as a Centennial College Project Management student. “[It’s] a large part of the job,” he explained.

In his internship role at Upgraded, Ercan is enabled to employ many of the skills he gained during his practical project management training at WIMTACH. His responsibilities include reviewing key deliverables for the Upgraded team and breaking them down into manageable daily tasks, ensuring that the team has the resources to complete their goals. “The project management education that Ercan has is pretty relevant to what we need here,” said Haris.

Before the start of the internship, Haris was a bit hesitant to work with an intern. He recognized that the suggestion of integrating a student intern into a team can often bring up concerns about whether interns can contribute effectively during the duration of their training, but almost immediately, Ercan was able to assuage those concerns. “It’s pretty cool because the impact can happen a lot earlier than you realize,” said Haris. “Expectations are definitely being exceeded.”

Haris and Will have even developed a strong camaraderie with Ercan. As a result, they have already begun the process of extending his internship to include him in other projects in the future. “We’d love to keep him around,” said Harris.

So far, Ercan and the Upgraded team have been successful in improving the quality and consistency of their grant application processes and as the team is finalizing their current development phase, Haris and Will have explained that Ercan’s role has been instrumental. He has helped the team to reduce the amount of time required to prepare each application by better restructuring processes to remove unnecessary or redundant steps in the preparation of grants. Internally, the Upgraded team recognizes this key contribution as the “time to value” impact. “Ercan’s work really helps to make sure that it’s going down … we want time to value to be as low as possible,” clarified Haris.

The Upgraded team is trying to develop a tool with the ability to source various financing resources for their business clients and this would require the use of large language learning models. For the expertise to train and enhance this tool to ensure that it is producing accurate information, Haris and Will are hoping to include additional technical talents from the WIMTACH team.

For further information, please send press inquiries to ptyagi@centennialcollege.ca