Granis is central intelligence for your organization. It connects the documents, schedules, tasks, and financial data an organization already holds into a single, evidence-backed backbone — the organizational spine — so that grants, proposals, reports, and strategic decisions start from a single source of truth instead of a blank page. I am its founder and systems architect. This is the story of how it came to be, and of the unusual way its founding team formed.

It started with grants#

Granis began as grant management software. I started working on the grant platform two years ago, and the earliest version of the current system still carried that heritage in its name: the project was literally called Grants before it became Granus, and finally Granis. Its first public sentence described building "your organization's backbone from documents" to generate truthful, evidence-backed applications.

Grant work turned out to be the perfect forge for something larger, because grants are the most demanding form of a universal problem. A funder asks an organization to prove what it is, what it has done, what it spends, and what it will do — with evidence, under deadline. Most organizations hold every fact required to answer. The facts are simply buried across PDFs, inboxes, spreadsheets, and people's heads.

Solving that for grants meant building an evidence layer: documents become verified facts, verified facts become reusable evidence, and every output strengthens the next one. Once that layer existed, the boundary around "grants" dissolved on its own. The same spine that prepares a grant submission answers an RFP, renders a financial report from categorized transactions, drafts a milestone article, and gives approved AI tools one governed source of truth. The category found its name in 2026: central intelligence. Grant intelligence remains the first and strongest proof point.

Proof before promotion#

Granis grew up inside real organizations rather than in front of them. The reference case is Save a Warrior UK, a veterans' mental-health community interest company. Granis ingested 35 bank statement PDFs spanning September 2023 through June 2026, categorized 1,219 transactions, and the team used the organizational spine to prepare five grant submissions in one week — more than £100,000 in requested funding, including Stage 2 documents for the Royal Navy & Royal Marines Charity after a successful Stage 1 application.

One detail from that case defines the product's ethics: Granis did not click submit. The system prepares review-ready material; the organization decides what goes out the door. Granis is a system for organizing and deploying what an organization already knows — it never replaces judgment, advisors, or approval. The same principle explains why the public site has no sign-up button. Access begins with preparation, because the quality of the evidence determines the quality of the outcome.

When your first users become your co-founders#

The most meaningful validation a product can receive is not a metric. It is when the people who use it every day ask to build it with you.

In July 2026, two of Granis's earliest adopters joined as co-founders.

Adam Gornall leads Save a Warrior UK — the organization behind the reference case — and has spent years building what he describes as a novel solution to suicide. He joined Granis as an entrepreneur, active product user, and commercial advocate: using the platform inside his own organizations, testing its value in real environments, and introducing it across his network. As he put it in his announcement, the strongest products "are built through close contact with the people and organisations that actually use them."

Johny Fraser spent fifteen-plus years scaling hospitality businesses across Europe, Australia, and Asia — including leading the UK business and scaling European operations at JOE & THE JUICE — before acquiring and growing Aguatech by Fresh & Pure Water in Tenerife, where he put Granis to work beyond grants entirely. His announcement carried the thesis better than I could: the organizations that win with AI "will be the ones that organise and leverage their knowledge better than anyone else."

Neither writes software. That is the point. Granis already had its systems architect; what it needed was exactly what it gained — operators who live inside the problem, use the product daily, and carry it into the world. I invited them because working with them was the best part of building Granis, and because a central-intelligence system should be steered by people whose organizations depend on it.

The founding pattern#

Between Granis and my co-founder role at Activate, a pattern has become my conviction about founding teams: pair the people who hold the problem with the person who builds the system, and let the product be the place they meet. At Activate, I am the builder alongside a domain visionary. At Granis, I am the founder, and the domain experts grew out of the user base itself.

Granis is three months into its current incarnation as a platform — 1,468 commits between late April and late July 2026 — and two years into its purpose. The spine gets stronger with every document, deadline, and transaction it absorbs, which means year one is about building the spine and year two is about reusing it. That compounding is the whole thesis: organizations do not lack knowledge. They lack a place where their knowledge compounds.

Granis is that place. Your expertise, amplified.