Funding Signals API: Get the US federal money trail for a technology term — USAspending and NIH RePORTER

Get the US federal money trail for a technology term — returns USAspending obligations by fiscal year with 3y growth, top recipients, NIH grant counts and recent projects, plus flags. Use instead of joining two federal APIs.

$0.02 per call — pay with prepaid card credits (Authorization: Bearer ck_live_…, packs from $1) or with USDC over x402: call it, get 402 with the price, retry signed. Failed calls are never charged.

How do you call it?

GET /v1/funding/signals — product id funding_signals. Over MCP, call answerpool_get with product_id=funding_signals.

curl "https://answerpool.io/v1/funding/signals?term=quantum+computing"

# with a prepaid credit key
curl -H "Authorization: Bearer ck_live_..." "https://answerpool.io/v1/funding/signals?term=quantum+computing"

Live call: https://answerpool.io/v1/funding/signals?term=quantum+computing · JSON sample: /v1/samples/funding_signals

What does the answer look like?

A representative response, the same static sample served at /v1/samples/funding_signals.

usaspending_by_fy

{
 "as_of": "2026-08-30T18:00:00Z",
 "term": "quantum computing",
 "fiscal_years": [
  2022,
  2023,
  2024,
  2025,
  2026
 ],
 "usaspending_by_fy": [
  {
   "fiscal_year": 2025,
   "total_obligations_usd": 237100000.0,
   "contract_obligations_usd": 180000000.0,
   "grant_obligations_usd": 57100000.0
  }
 ],
 "usaspending_growth_3y": 0.48,
 "top_recipients": [
  {
   "name": "UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO",
   "amount_usd": 44900000.0,
   "uei": "UYTTZT6G9DT1"
  }
 ],
 "nih_projects_by_fy": {
  "2024": 47,
  "2025": 37
 },
 "nih_growth_3y": 0.19,
 "nih_recent_projects": [
  {
   "project_num": "1R01EB035892-01",
   "title": "Quantum sensing for neuroimaging",
   "organization": "MIT",
   "award_amount_usd": 612000.0,
   "fiscal_year": 2026
  }
 ],
 "flags": [
  "partial_current_fy",
  "nih_active"
 ],
 "refresh_after": "2026-09-18T00:00:00.000Z"
}

How fresh is it, and where does the data come from?

The fastest source behind this answer can change daily, so every response carries a refresh_after timestamp — right now it would be 2026-09-18T00:00:00.000Z. Schedule the next call on that value rather than on a guess.

• USAspending (US federal public domain) — upstream: https://api.usaspending.gov/api/v2
• NIH RePORTER (US federal public domain) — upstream: https://api.reporter.nih.gov/v2

Method version 0.1.0 · serving cache 1 day · every response carries a result_id you can resolve at /v1/provenance.

When should you use it?

You need federal funding momentum, recipients, or NIH activity for a technology in one structured call.

What you skip building

• USAspending API filters and pagination
• RePORTER query syntax
• fiscal-year growth math
• recipient aggregation

When should you not use it?

You need a full census of a technology (keyword-matched only), classified or state spending, or investment advice.

Where else can you find this?

• Catalog entry (JSON, free)
• OpenAPI schema — input and output types, prices, the 402 flow
• llms.txt — every product in one plain-text document