Unlocking Grant Success: How AI is Transforming the Process with Mark Taylor of Grant Hero

So welcome again to Gauls Question Time. Today I've got the pleasure of being joined by Mark Taylor, who's co-founder of GrantHero. Hi, Mark.

Hi, Andrew. Thanks for having me today.

Very good to have you here. We've had some recent discussions about raising investment and that for some of the businesses I've been working with, so delighted to have you on to give us some insights, please. But give us an introduction to yourself first. Your background, and we'll get into some of the questions then about raising investment.

Yeah, sure. So I've worked in product management for about 6 or 7 years now, mainly in the software space, zero-to-one stuff. So a lot of my work was focused on validating customer demand and launching products. Uh, then I worked at Innovate UK for about 18 months, maybe 2 years, Um, that was my first introduction into the grant funding landscape where I really looked under the hood. So I was involved a lot with winning applications and also helping support companies who'd won grants. So this is where I started to cut my teeth in the grant funding world. And since leaving there a couple of years ago, I've won a few grants personally and for other clients. And now I am working on Grant Hero, which is an AI-powered tool to help streamline grant applications particularly for Innovate UK competitions.

Great, okay. Can you kick off by giving us a bit of an understanding of the marketplace and the, you know, who's giving grants, what sort of things are they giving grants for, and where's the best place to sort of look for them? Because these are constantly changing, aren't they? So a bit of an introduction to that landscape would be great.

Yeah, sure. So Innovate UK has had a bit of a lull of competitions recently, so they had a new CEO who joined the organisation earlier this year, and this combined with a new government has meant that decision makers have been figuring out, you know, where to deploy funds and, you know, maybe even to shake up the system, right, in terms of how companies apply for grants, particularly with AI entering the frame a couple of years ago, making applications more accessible. In terms of the, the high-level funding that's available for businesses, what we do know is that has increased. So The UK budget for R&D funding has gone up from £20 billion to £22 billion for the next year, and Innovate UK has gone up from just under a billion to around £1.2 billion. So there is funding available, it's just a matter of waiting out to see where, you know, money is going to be deployed and in what format they will be. Specifically for Innovate UK, the last strategy document they did ran from 2022 to 2025, so we are on the cusp of waiting for that to be updated. The Modern Industrial UK Strategy was published around a month ago. This was running from '25 to '35, so another 10 years from now. And this is a really good peek into what kind of ventures the British government will be funding over the next decade. And there's no surprises, it's a lot of stuff around digital and AI, net zero, healthcare, and all this kind of stuff. So this is a really good precursor for what's probably going to make its way into the Innovate UK strategy over the next few years. In terms of where to find competitions, you can sign up to the Innovate UK newsletter, so you can tick various different sectors that you might be interested in, and they will send you relevant competitions. I'm also trying to streamline that process with Grand Hero, as we've spoken about before, using AI to basically take scopes or, you know, knowledge base about a company that you're working on and basically actively go out and scan and find opportunities overseas, but this is very much in the early stages at the moment.

Okay, great, great. There's a great overview. So if you could take us through, you know, when one of these competitions comes out, typically what's the format, and typically what is the eligibility and sort of evaluation criteria they're sort of looking for?

Yeah, so Innovate UK competitions specifically happen through a website called the Innovation Funding Service, For EIC, which is European grants, and they have their own dedicated website. So it's typical that each funding body will have their own website where you as a user can go on there, you can see the kind of questions they're asking, what the application process is. The typical process is create an account, there's normally a part of the grant which is scored questions, so basically questions that you'll be assessed on, and sometimes some non-scored questions such as what is the location of your business, what's, you know, how you summarize the, the title of your project, for example. In terms of other information that's useful to know in there around eligibility, my background obviously is very much in the R&D and the innovation space, so it goes without saying, but the project should be innovative. What that looks like really depends on the kind of sector that you're, you're going for, but typically I like to think about grants like this R&D grants, which are quite high risk and high reward, are reserved for companies where other investment vehicles would not be eligible. So if you are doing something which is quite high risk R&D, which a private investor such as an angel or a VC, for example, would not be willing to take a punt on, they are really good vehicles for funding those kind of ventures. In terms of other eligibility, there's a lot of other things around being a UK registered business and a few other bits and pieces, but a lot of those are fairly standard and can be found on the website. The TL;DR for anyone listening, I would say, is, you know, make sure that you match the competition brief very well in terms of what it's looking to do, and make sure that, you know, you're doing something which is innovative if you're going for a grant which is in the R&D space.

And as well as having the criteria and the form on their websites, they usually also have like a webinar telling you a bit more information about it. If you can give us a bit more information about why those are, if they're useful in participating and what extra information you can get from those. Yeah, correct.

So with Innovate UK, they typically do what's called a briefing webinar. You can find that on the Innovate UK site. There's a tab typically called supporting information, so if you go into there, you can find either the recording of that webinar if you're not able to attend it, or you can, you can find the dates of when that webinar is, excuse me, and attend that live. So that's super useful just for getting a breakdown of the terminology that people in the grant are using, because personally I like to play that back when I'm applying for a competition to make the assessors understand that you're within scope. Again, something I'm working on with Grant Hero is eligibility GPTs, which basically use that information around the briefing, the scope, to provide people a chat console so they can just ask questions and they don't have to go through that time-consuming process of, you know, scouring the eligibility criteria. But if you go on to Innovate UK website, just looking through that supporting information and the eligibility summary is typically enough to find out Is this something I should be looking to apply for?

Yeah, no, great, great. You know, I've done a number of applications of that going back many years, and yeah, having to read through all of that information on their website and then having to think about what's, you know, what, what you're bringing to the party. And within the last year or two, you know, I've started to use, you scrape the stuff that's on the web, on the website for the eligibility, scrape the stuff from your pitch deck and get AI to answer some of those things. So that's, I guess, that's a very basic use of AI for doing these sorts of things. Tell us a bit more about what you do, or what else we should be thinking about, how we can make this better for both sides, right? It's not just the venture, but it's also Innovate UK getting better quality pitches rather than getting ones that are only just could be bothered to fill it out.

So Yeah, that's, that's a really good— it's a really good question. You are right in that this is a prime use case for AI. So getting, you know, getting a good knowledge base into ChatGPT or Claude or, you know, whatever your flavor is of LLM that you might use and giving it a good understanding of your business and then pairing that with competition briefs that you think could be interesting for your company. Um, is a great way of quickly understanding if you are eligible. Um, I actually built a, a very simple GPT for a competition that's out at the moment called Sovereign AI, um, which is AI focused on a few very specific sectors. Again, an Innovate UK competition. I sent it to a friend who's, um, he's building a product called Sagittal. He's in Twinpath Ventures, uh, John Spindleton.

Oh yeah, John, I recently did a podcast on that with him as well. So yeah, shout out to John.

Yeah, um, and yeah, I sent, I sent Michael, who's the founder of Sagittar, I sent him the GPT and he sent me the dialogue that he had with it, right? Just a quick bit of back and forth. And it didn't actually help just to validate if it was a good— if what he's doing is a good fit for the competition. It actually helped him with scoping So, you know, obviously LLMs love to help, so it came back and said, hey, you know, this might not be the right fit, but have you thought about this? And you could tell that was actually really useful for him, not just to kind of shoehorn this R&D project, but actually find out, oh, here's an innovative angle that we hadn't considered. So I do think there's a really interesting use case here for founders, innovators, you know, academics, whatever they may be, who are working on a project that could be eligible for government funding. I think with AI now, the challenge is going to be for Innovate UK and their CEO, I think it's Tom Adoiola, spoke to this recently, was actually around how do you make sure that if you get a good application through the door, the team behind that application can actually deliver? Obviously another segue now, but that will be a critical part of understanding, you know, from the UK government's perspective, what is actually, you know, what is actually eligible, right? And who are the people that sit behind this application? But from a scoping perspective and an identification perspective, there's a fantastic use case there for AI.

Yeah, yeah, no, I think before we move on to your particular application, I would agree with you there because I've built a platform to do review pitch decks and review investments. Applications. So similar sort of thing, right, about reviewing a pitch deck, matching that to the right investors, and then the feedback that the AI, as you said, sort of gives to, to sharpen the model, to do the competitor analysis, to do the business model analysis, and sort of things like that can really help sharpen that stuff. And the entrepreneurs get value out of it. And the investors I've shown it to get value out of it as well, because it saves them reading through a lot of stuff that isn't, doesn't match and that with them. So I agree with that point that, you know, Innovate UK need to think about is the team behind it, but they should always have done that, right? It's not about, to me, it's not about having the right pitch deck. And yes, it was the right shiny glossy pitch deck. That should have always been the case. I think now we can help entrepreneurs get better, present themselves better, and also use AI to learn. And I'll, I'll post on, on— I'll post as part of this podcast that article I wrote about sort of saying, well, now investors, instead of investing one £5 million, could invest 50 £100,000 investments using AI to monitor and then coach and support the entrepreneurs. Yeah, and then we'll get more successful entrepreneurs and we'll get more successful outputs, and the ones that are succeeding will get more investment. And I think there's a lot of parallels to the grant sort of type ones, because as you said, Innovate UK want to invest in more risky research-oriented type ventures. But like, I was, I was responding to some research and a founder in Oxford University this morning, and it's like, well, they haven't got the business background, so can we support them in how they build the proposition, right? So Innovate UK shouldn't just be investing in businesses that are just interesting tech. It should be, well, can we help the ones to see how they're going to commercialize it, etc. So Yeah, indeed.

And there's, um, there's a pathway of competitions called Investor Partnerships, which were, I believe, created to try to solve that problem. Because Innovate UK, I think, conceded that they were investing, as you say, purely in R&D rather than looking at the commercial angle. You know, we take something from TRL 2 to 6, then we're getting, you know, on the edge of a marketable prototype. But the money and the scope that we've given them for that project is just pure R&D. How do we around that challenge. And the investor partnership, which is the last one I won personally, which are from Jensen Funding Ventures, um, we've got £200K from Innovate UK but also £200K from Jensen SEIS. And that's, to my mind, that's a really great way of solving that problem, is giving them the, you know, the investor knowledge plus the cash that they can actually spend on, on marketing and commercialization.

Yeah, no, definitely, definitely, because I You know, sometimes I don't want to show my bias, but, you know, if I see pitches coming to me and they say, oh yes, they've had, you know, 2, 3, 4 Innovate UK grants, but they haven't had any investment, I'm starting to wonder, I said, well, you know, I'm not quite sure about this, if it's still on that stage. So great, could you give us a bit more then about Grant Hero? Because, you know, I understand that bit about the where those Innovate UK things are, and I understand about making things better, but the thing I've always found is how do I find the right one that matches me so I'm not having to go and look at the pages all the time and, and having to think, do I fit? So tell us a bit more about what Grant Hero does.

Sure, so the vision for Grant Hero would be to include more elements to the workflow of you know, identifying suitable grant funding opportunities, um, through to, to utilizing AI to streamline applications and get reviews, right, either from the AI or from human experts before then finally submitting a bid. Um, that's obviously where we want to be. Where we are and why I started the company was I was consulting in the space, and obviously as a product person, I was looking at the advancements in AI and thinking 'Yeah, I believe this can be streamlined somewhat.' The main focus of that was on how people get what's in their head onto paper and how we review what's on the paper to basically streamline the process of going from an idea to a completed grant application. Because even after the identification part of the workflow, you're still looking at 80+ hours to then pull together an application and get one done. So Just for clarification, the positioning of my product at the moment is people who probably have already identified that they are eligible for Innovate UK funding and they want to speed up the process, right? In terms of the identification piece, we do have an early prototype of that in the product. What it effectively does is use a large language model to read the eligibility and the scope criteria from a competition, and then we have different tags that we've created based on you know, is this AI, is this life sciences, is this cybersecurity, etc. And we will utilize that information to say, hey, you told us, you know, you were in cybersecurity, therefore this grant might be eligible. Um, it's step one, obviously, of the identification process, but I'd like to bring a little bit more intelligence around this by doing what a bid writer would call a scoping exercise, right? So if you jump on a call with a bid writer, probably one of the first things they will do for your company is generate a scope, so kind of a proposal of what kind of R&D you'd like to undertake, and they will go off into the market and try and look for those opportunities. And they also might find opportunities and come back and say, hey, this is maybe slightly different to your scope, however there could be something here. That's obviously something that can be done fairly easily with AI as well. So that's transcending that, you know, tick box sector exercise and actually saying, hey, provide like an open field text description of your innovation and we'll go out and find opportunities for you. And there could be other things as well we could throw into the mix, right? Like how many people are on your team, what kind of R&D capabilities do you want to have, you know, do you— would you like to partner with academia and things like this are all quite important. But the purpose and the focus of the tool that we've built so far has been more focused on once you've identified the relevant competition, how do you speed up the process of getting a good grant application together?

All right, great. Good stuff. Good. Yeah, I think maybe there's an opportunity to collaborate on the investment sort of side in that then, as you said, because in parallel, these 'These entrepreneurs should be thinking about investment,' or they'll be doing that in the next stage, or sort of stuff like that. So I think there's areas there to support and all that as well. And I suppose, where do you see the worth of the humans in doing and supporting these grants and that at the moment? And where do you think we're going to be handing more over to AI, or is it always going to be a human interaction bit? Where are you on that sort of scale and timing?

Yeah, that's a great question. Um, the way I like to think about human support is really based on the persona of the applicant. So I actually just sold a product-only version to a company at Norwich Research Park called Hothouse Therapeutics, um, which do a lot in bioengineering, and they use AI a lot to help improve outcomes from plant medicine and things like that. So they have the software part as the AI looking at ways they can improve outcomes using bioengineering. And this team had, you know, had been through a lot of previous Innovate UK applications, right? So they didn't really want or need my expert review. However, they've shown interest in maybe, you know, hey, can you give us feedback on a few questions, right? Like the project management or the team, right? Because there's a highly technical team that's maybe an area I could add value. So I think there's, there's always going to be value in getting a human to look over it, whether it's somebody who has domain expertise or someone who can lift a certain part of a question that AI would maybe give a generic response. But if we go back to the persona of that user, that's a persona of someone who is highly familiar with the Innovate UK landscape, has won previous competitions, and is simply looking for tooling that they can trust over and above ChatGPT to get a faster application out the door. And the other persona is like Sagittal, the TwinPath company that I mentioned earlier. They don't have as much experience with Innovate UK applications, and if they just went in blind, I suppose, for want of a better word, into just utilising just a tool to try and help polish an application, and they had really no previous experience of submitting risk registers, work plans, all of these other things which are important, I don't believe for a company that's in that persona that would be enough to bring a successful application. So in short, I think humans are always going to have a role. I'd love to see how we could move away from the cookie-cutter approach that traditional consultancies have had of, you know, hey, we'll just charge you 5 grand for an application review, to something more like a, you know, a Fiverr marketplace, right, where you could bid if you want 3, 4, 5 hours of support, or you want support on a few questions, that's different because you're not wanting a whole review. So I think it's important to consider the nature of the support that the applicant needs and maybe try and implement more flexibility into the system where actually if they need support in just a few areas, the human can jump in. But I think the human will always beat the AI on that strategic domain expertise advice, but the AI will always beat the human on things like deep market research, drafting, things like that. So I think a hybrid approach makes sense at the moment.

No, that's great, Mark. That's great. Thanks so much for your insights on, uh, on grants and that whole process, because I think it's a really important part for any growing and innovative company. So thanks so much for your time today. My pleasure, anytime.

Great to speak with you.