Learn how you can increase your chance of winning grant funding
UK grant funding is a great choice for eligible founders, but there’s a big problem — only 3% of solo applications win.
Why should you consider grant funding?
If you are a founder, or thinking of becoming one, there are three main ways to get money for your company.
The first is to take money from investors in return for equity in your company. This is called “venture capital” funding. It’s what most startups do.
The second way to get funding is by staying lean and bootstrapping. You’ll focus on selling your idea as early as possible, if customers will pay you enough to cover your expenses while you are working on their problem, that’s good enough to keep you going while you are starting out. If the problem turns out not to be that interesting after all, then at least you have learned something useful, and it will save you the trouble of trying to raise money from investors.
The third is to get a government grant. The UK government will give you money without asking for equity. Obviously you have to make it through the application process, or you get nothing!
We’ve written more about the benefits of grants in our beginner’s guide to startup funding. The short version is that it has never been easier to secure significant capital in UK government grant funding for your startup. Capital that you’ll never have to pay back, requires no equity, and that could fulfil even your greatest business aspirations.
Grants are the best kind of funding available for startup founders. You don’t lose any equity, and you never have to pay the money back.
About Grantify
When Grantify’s founders – Mat and Luke – applied for an Innovate UK Smart Grant to develop a new medical device, it secured them £240,000. Getting that level of funding privately would have required giving up a crucial stake in their business.
The stress and hassle that Luke and Mat felt during the application process inspired them to create Grantify.
Today, Grantify helps founders secure significant levels of grant funding and has helped many startups scale faster. In fact, 64% of winners of a 2021 Innovate UK round were Grantify clients.
Grantify reviews
Applying for an Innovate UK grant is a daunting process but Grantify make it all seem so much more tractable. From the moment I signed into their platform I was able to structure my time and work on the grant application and save countless hours and days with the formatting and preparing of the grant submission. Their expertise, flexibility and willingness to help ensured that we made it over the line in the nick of time. Entrepreneurs: Don’t try this alone, work with the professionals!
Mpowa
https://mpowa.io/We won a sizable Innovate UK SMART grant with the support of Grantify. They were incredibly effective at guiding us through the whole process from start to finish. I feel it would have been unlikely for us to win the grant without such support. They were even happy to spend hours on the phone with us as and when we needed it throughout our application. Very impressed and we will almost certainly use Grantify again when applying for future project funding.
Flairbox
https://flairbox.co/Why we recommend Grantify to our accelerator cohorts
Having personally completed five unsuccessful grant applications in 18 months, I’ve come to accept that I’m a founder and entrepreneur, not a grant writer. It’s a specific talent, one that I don’t currently possess and have absolutely zero inclination to learn.
We started working with Grantify as our expert partner for UK grant funding (Mat provides free workshops for founders on the SeedReady pre-accelerator).
A number of founders from our cohorts have worked with Grantify to successfully win grant applications and have rapidly grown their businesses.
We love the tech that Grantify use to streamline the grant application process, it cuts the amount of time required down from 6-8 weeks to days. This means that founders spend their time growing the business and reaching customers, not writing grants.
We continue to have confidence in Mat and his team as they not only guarantee to help with your second application for free should the first fail, but since the launch of their new platform the data shows that Grantify applicants are five times more likely to win when compared the industry average.