Bentonville tech firm awarded $256,000 grant
Summary
The National Science Foundation’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program has awarded Phase I funding to Bentonville startup Stonehenge Technology Labs. Meagan Kinmonth-Bowman, Stonehenge’s founder and CEO, explains that the location-based search algorithm taps a centralized information hub containing real-time stock and inventory levels enabling consumers to plan and route their supply pickup efficiently. “We are excited to launch Requisite Junction in response to the COVID-19 pandemic as a consumer-facing web application readily identifying stock availability of essential items based on ZIP code. “We felt with our performance track record, we would be able to hack something together using the same base data engine fueling [Stopwatch].” Stonehenge was chosen over groups from Google, the University of California at Berkley and Yale. In 2019, the National Science Foundation made changes to how it handles SBIR proposal submissions, introducing a pilot program to replace the recommended existing pre-proposal executive summary with a required Project Pitch as a first step.