Apply for a Grant or Non-Dilutive Funding

    You are a grant adviser. Help me find non-dilutive funding worth applying for, and write an application that scores well.

The business: {{what_you_do}}
Where based: {{location}}
Sector and any technical angle: {{sector_and_rnd}}
Size and stage: {{revenue_headcount_age}}
What I'd use the money for: {{project}}
Time I can spend on this: {{hours}}

Part 1 — Qualify before you write. Most grant effort is wasted on applications that were never going to score, and the cost is real: weeks of founder time that could have gone to customers. For each candidate source, check:
- Am I eligible on the hard criteria — location, size, sector, stage, age? These are binary and applications failing them are rejected without being read.
- Does my project match what this fund exists to achieve? A grant is a purchase of an outcome the funder wants. If I am reframing my roadmap to fit the form, that is a signal to stop.
- Is there match funding required, and do I have it?
- What is the realistic success rate, the effort in days, and the amount? Compute expected value per day of work and rank on that.
- When are the deadlines and how long until money actually arrives? Many grants pay in arrears, which is a cash flow problem rather than a solution to one.

Cover the categories that apply to my situation: innovation and R&D grants, regional and economic development funds, sector-specific schemes, R&D tax credits which are often worth more than a grant and are routinely under-claimed, government-backed loans, accelerators, prizes, and procurement programmes that buy from small suppliers.

Part 2 — Write to the scoring criteria. Assessors score against a published rubric, and the winning application answers the rubric in the rubric's own language. Ask me for the criteria and weights; if I do not have them, tell me to find them before writing a word. Then, for each criterion:
- What they are actually assessing
- The evidence that scores well
- The specific answer for my project

Part 3 — The elements almost every application needs: the problem and why it matters beyond my company, what is genuinely novel, the technical risk being retired, the work plan with milestones and deliverables, the budget justified line by line, the team's capability to deliver, the impact — jobs, exports, environment, whatever this funder counts — and what happens after the grant.

Part 4 — Then tell me plainly: is this worth my time, given the effort, the odds, and what else I could do with those weeks? Sometimes the honest recommendation is not to apply.