Orbit, explained.
Straight answers about how Orbit ranks opportunities, handles research data, and supports funding strategy across different career stages.
What is Orbit actually doing for me?
Orbit helps scientists and trainees move from generic grant search to prioritized funding strategy. It builds a persistent scientific identity from the information you provide, then uses that identity together with your ideas, career stage, and preferences to surface grants and funded labs that are more likely to matter for your real research direction.
How does Orbit decide what appears in my dashboard?
Orbit ranks opportunities using multiple signals at once: scientific fit, career-stage relevance, idea context, preference examples, deadline timing, and overall opportunity quality. The goal is not just to show a large list of grants, but to help you focus on the opportunities most worth your attention first.
What happens to the data I enter into Orbit?
Orbit stores the profile information you choose to provide so your scientific identity, rankings, and workspace can persist over time. That information is used to personalize matching, improve fit explanations, and support features inside your workspace. Orbit does not use your data for advertising or sell it to third parties. When AI or embedding features are enabled, selected profile text may be processed by server-side providers to generate derived signals used for matching.
Do I need to connect ORCID, PubMed, or a CV to use Orbit?
No. You can start with a manual scientific summary, keywords, and profile details. Connecting sources such as ORCID, PubMed, or CV context can strengthen your scientific identity, but they are not required to begin using Orbit.
Does Orbit make any of my research information public?
No. Orbit does not turn your scientific profile, saved ideas, or workspace activity into a public researcher page. Your information is used inside the product to support matching, ranking, and workspace features. In shared lab workspaces, relevant information may be visible to workspace members as part of collaboration features.
Why do broad opportunities sometimes appear alongside highly specific ones?
Because a strong funding strategy usually includes both. Some opportunities are highly specific to your science, while others are broader mechanisms that can still be valuable for researchers in your field or stage. Orbit is designed to prioritize strong-fit opportunities first, while still showing broader but credible options when they are genuinely relevant.
Why would I train Orbit with example grants?
Your scientific identity explains what your research is about. Training Orbit with example grants adds a preference layer that shows what strong-fit opportunities look like to you in practice. That helps Orbit distinguish between grants that are merely related to your field and grants that feel strategically right for your work.
How often does the catalog update?
Premium plans use a daily live catalog for grants and funded labs. Orbit Explorer uses a smaller, more stable catalog with a slower refresh cadence. The goal is to make Explorer a lightweight way to understand Orbit, while Premium plans support more active and continuously updated funding work.
What is the difference between Orbit Explorer and the Premium plans?
Orbit Explorer is the lightweight entry plan. It gives you access to the core Orbit experience with a smaller catalog, lighter personalization, and fewer active workflow features. Premium plans unlock the daily-updating catalog, deeper identity building, stronger personalization, and the more active parts of Orbit such as richer monitoring and broader workspace capabilities.
Does Orbit only work for PIs?
No. Orbit is built for trainees as well as PIs. Orbit Trainee is designed for PhD candidates and postdocs, while Orbit PI extends the system for principal investigators and lab leaders. The matching logic takes career stage into account so the platform can prioritize more relevant opportunities for different kinds of researchers.
Can I use Orbit for my lab or team?
Yes. Orbit PI and Orbit Lab are designed for team-based funding strategy. They make it possible to work across multiple researchers, compare opportunity fit across people, and support grant planning at the lab level instead of only at the level of a single individual account.