Funding
Explore financial assistance options
Three routes. Between them they cover most UK businesses, and almost nobody claims what they're entitled to, because every one of them is badly explained wherever you look.
We're a consultancy, not an accountant or a grant body. We have a commercial interest in you finding funding for work we might do. We've written these guides as if we didn't.
R&D tax relief
Any sector · any size · claimed after the fact
The one almost everybody misses. HMRC's merged scheme gives a 20% above-the-line credit on qualifying R&D, worth roughly 16.2% net, as a corporation tax reduction if you're profitable, or a cash payment if you're not.
The catch is what counts. Building a standard website doesn't. Routine bug fixing doesn't. Plugging two systems together with an off-the-shelf connector doesn't. But resolving a genuine technical uncertainty does, and a surprising amount of serious systems work qualifies: custom data architecture, complex database scaling, non-standard integration with legacy systems, pipelines that normalise incompatible data schemas.
If you're loss-making and R&D-intensive, the enhanced scheme pays 27%.
What qualifies, and what doesn'tMade Smarter
Manufacturers · South West · applied for in advance
50% match funding, £1,000 to £20,000, for production-based SMEs in Gloucestershire, Swindon, Wiltshire, Bristol and the wider South West. Live now, with £800,000 available for the 2026/27 intake.
The thing most manufacturers get wrong: they assume it only pays for machines and licences. It covers technical consultancy on data integration too, which is usually the expensive part, and the part that actually determines whether the software works.
The thing nobody mentions: it's reimbursed, not deducted. You pay the full cost and claim half back about three months later.
How Made Smarter works 28 straight answersInnovate UK BridgeAI
Agriculture, construction, creative, transport & logistics
A government programme aimed squarely at the sectors that have been left behind, and they really have been. Only 1% of UK construction firms have adopted AI at all, and roughly nine in ten construction, hospitality and transport businesses report no near-term plans to.
BridgeAI funds and up-skills businesses in those sectors and connects them with vetted developers and academic experts. If you're in one of them, you are simultaneously the least served and the best funded buyer in the country.
We're not a BridgeAI delivery partner and we won't pretend to be. But if you're eligible, it's worth knowing about before you spend your own money.
Can you use more than one?
Carefully, and not on the same expenditure. Grant funding and R&D tax relief interact, taking a notified state aid grant can change which R&D scheme a project falls under, and getting it wrong is expensive.
It's often possible to structure work so the grant-funded phase and the R&D-qualifying phase are genuinely separate projects. But that has to be planned before anything starts, not reverse-engineered afterwards when the claim is being written.
The honest version
We can tell you which door is likely to be open to you, and we can structure the work so it fits. We are not accountants and we do not file R&D claims. For anything that touches HMRC, use a specialist, and use one who'll tell you when you don't have a claim.
Where to start
A free call to work out what's possible
Forty-five minutes, no charge, no deck. Tell us what you are trying to achieve and where technology feels like it is holding you back. We will tell you honestly what is possible, what it would take, and roughly what it is worth. If there is nothing worth building, we will say so.
The scoping call is a short version of Analyse. If you decide to go ahead, we harden it up into the full thing, a detailed project summary rather than a first impression. If you don't, you still leave knowing what's possible and roughly what it's worth.