I'm gonna apply to financing all by myself. I can come up with $50k over two years out of my own savings. Will hire two math/comp-sci juniors and train them into quant devs, have them extend and improve my backtesting & auto trading software and most importantly ramp them up into "miners" of trading strategies. This will leverage my time invested from 2-3 hours per day to (16 + 2). Best of all, at the end of the period I get my money back from the state so I did it all for free. Gained two additional years of leveraged research, saved another $50k as trading capital and if all goes well, we can continue self-financing from that capital and strategies mined in the meantime.
