State funding hub
California founders get a dense university and accelerator layer on top of national equity-free programs. Bootstrap Directory currently lists 8 California-specific competitions and accelerators—including StartX, UC Berkeley SkyDeck and LAUNCH, Stanford BASES, UCLA Knapp, USC New Venture Seed, and LMU New Idea Pitch—plus national listings that also cover California.
Hub content and matching listings are refreshed from the live Bootstrap Directory database.
Sources include Grants.gov, SAM.gov, SBIR.gov, CareerOneStop, state agencies, universities, and verified organizations.
Listings are checked weekly where source data allows, with stale or closed programs removed from public results.
Create a free account, run this filtered search, and save it to receive matching funding and training updates.
Verified Aug 12, 2026
Verified Oct 15, 2026
Verified Aug 12, 2026
Verified Oct 15, 2026
Loyola Marymount University Fred Kiesner Center for Entrepreneurship
Verified Aug 12, 2026
UCLA Anderson School of Management — Price Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation
Verified Aug 12, 2026
U.S. Small Business Administration
Verified Oct 15, 2026
U.S. Small Business Administration
Verified Oct 15, 2026
Verified Jul 21, 2026
Distinct California listings today include StartX; UC Berkeley SkyDeck and Berkeley LAUNCH; Stanford BASES Challenge / BASES $100K Challenge; UCLA Anderson’s Knapp Venture Competition; USC’s New Venture Seed Competition; and LMU’s New Idea Pitch Competition. Award ceilings in our data range from about $10,000 to $200,000 depending on the program. Most are school-affiliated — confirm who can apply.
If you have a qualifying university affiliation, prioritize the matching campus competition or SkyDeck/StartX path. If not, use national equity-free grants and accelerators that include California coverage, and use the California business loans hub for IBank SSBCI credit rather than treating loans as grants.
This hub’s live grant slice is still dominated by national programs. Scraped CalOSBA resource pages are not reliable “California grant” inventory. Until state-scoped grant rows exist with proper geography, look for California grant programs on official agency sites such as CalOSBA and GO-Biz.
California-only competition and accelerator rows are stored as rolling/open without reliable deadline fields (last verified June–August 2026). Competition cycles are seasonal — always use the university or StartX apply page for the current deadline.
Eight under this hub’s filters: StartX, Berkeley LAUNCH, Stanford BASES Challenge, UC Berkeley SkyDeck, BASES $100K Challenge, USC New Venture Seed, UCLA Knapp, and LMU New Idea Pitch. Remaining cards are national programs also available in California.
Many of the California-only rows are university competitions or school-affiliated accelerators. Read each program’s affiliation rules; StartX and SkyDeck have their own applicant criteria that are not limited to a single course enrollment model.
They are not yet represented as clean state-scoped grant listings on our California grants page. Prefer official CalOSBA / GO-Biz sources for program discovery for now; this startup-funding hub highlights competitions and accelerators we can verify geographically.
IBank SSBCI programs and California CDFI lenders.
Pitch and business-plan competitions in California.
University pitch and business-plan competitions.
Grant programs available to California businesses.
Equity-free grants, competitions, and accelerators nationwide.