Are You Leaving Money On The Table?

There’s never been more public money earmarked for innovation. The UK government has committed to reaching £22.6 billion per year in R&D spending by 2029-30. Innovate UK continues to run dozens of live funding competitions across the UK. Yet the gap between what’s available and what’s actually being claimed is widening, partly because the landscape itself has become harder to navigate.

Take Innovate UK’s flagship Smart Grants. For years, they were the go-to open funding route for innovative SMEs. Then in January 2025, the programme was paused. There have been no Smart Grant rounds since and no confirmed return date. In its place, we’ve seen alternatives such as the Growth Catalyst pilot, a much smaller £10 million fund with grants of £25,000 to £50,000 aimed at early-stage startups. For the established SMEs that relied on Smart Grants to de-risk £100,000-plus R&D projects, that route has effectively closed.

What remains is a patchwork of sector-specific Innovate UK competitions, Horizon Europe collaborative calls, Innovation Loans and regional programmes, all with different eligibility criteria, timelines and application formats. The funding is still there, but you need to know where to look.

The R&D tax relief picture tells a similar story. HMRC’s latest statistics show total claims dropped 26% in the 2023-24 tax year, with SME claims falling by almost a third. In just two years, the number of businesses claiming R&D relief has effectively halved from over 90,000 to under 47,000. That’s not because innovation has slowed. It’s because compliance requirements have tightened, the old SME scheme has been replaced by a merged R&D Expenditure Credit, and many businesses find the current criteria difficult to navigate.

Grant funding and R&D tax relief work together

These aren’t competing strategies. A business that wins an innovation grant for a development project is almost certainly undertaking qualifying R&D activity. That means it can also potentially claim under the merged RDEC scheme. For loss-making, R&D-intensive SMEs spending at least 30% of their costs on qualifying R&D, the Enhanced R&D Intensive Support scheme offers relief of up to 27%, so for every £1 spent you could claim back as much as 27p. Most SMEs can expect a net benefit of around 15 to 16p for every pound of qualifying R&D spend in comparison. When you layer that onto a grant already covering 50 to 70% of eligible project costs, the net cost of innovation drops dramatically.

Too many businesses treat these as separate conversations and leave significant value behind.

If you’re not even asking the question, how will you push your project to the next stage?

Why we created GrantFlow

If you’re a founder or business owner, chances are you’ve seen a grant opportunity too late, spent time on an application only to realise you didn’t qualify, or known the funding was out there but simply couldn’t find the time to search through dozens of portals, pre-qualify each opportunity and write a competitive application on top of running your business.

We created GrantFlow at Livaty to solve this. As a business owner, you’re wearing every possible hat and there just isn’t enough time to do everything, so we take away a major headache: monitoring live opportunities, pre-qualifying them against your business, building a funding pipeline and writing applications that actually win.