Debt, Equity and Grant Funding for London Businesses

Funding advice tells you what to do and leaves you to execute it. Facilitation does the execution for you. We prepare the documentation, identify funding sources, make introductions, and support you through due diligence. The distinction matters because most funding failures are execution failures, not strategy failures. A correct strategy poorly executed yields the same result as an incorrect one: no funding.

Debt. No charge to you at any stage. Lenders pay us on completion.

Non-dilutive. A £299 setup fee covers scheme research and application preparation, credited in full against any preparation route you take. A success fee applies to the award.

Equity. A £299 investor matching fee, credited in full against any preparation route you take. A success fee applies on completion.

Where preparation work is needed on any route, it is quoted before it starts, and you decide whether to take it, do it yourself using our assessment as the specification, or use another provider.

A broker introduces you to a panel of lenders and earns a fee upon handover. A bank assesses you against its own single set of criteria. We prepare your case, introduce it to the funding sources it fits, and support you until the funder's questions are answered. The comparisons are set out in funding consultant versus going direct to your bank, and funding consultant versus funding broker.

Of the clients who start a funding engagement with us, 90% secure funding within 18 months. That figure reflects careful preparation and a selective first assessment.

There is no catch. We receive an introducer commission from the lending partner on completion, which is standard practice in the lending intermediary market and is declared transparently to both sides. The structure aligns our incentives with yours: we are paid only when you receive funding, and our reputation depends on the quality of the arrangements we facilitate. We introduce lenders on this basis for limited companies and LLPs. For sole traders and small partnerships, we can prepare the business plan, but we do not introduce lenders for commission.

With professional facilitation, equity funding processes are typically completed in six to eight months from the point that investment-ready materials are available. Self-managed processes typically take twelve to eighteen months, largely because of slower investor response management, less systematic outreach, and the time lost to approaches to unsuitable investors. The timeline depends on the funding amount, the business's stage and sector, and market conditions at the point of raise.

We work with current UK government-backed lending schemes, including the Growth Guarantee Scheme (GGS) and sector-specific innovation and development funding programmes. We also facilitate funding through the British Business Bank's partner lenders and regional development funds. We do not work with schemes that are no longer active -- any scheme referenced in our materials is current at the time of engagement. If you have a question about a specific scheme, we will advise on its current status and eligibility criteria during the assessment.

Yes, and this is a common situation. A bank decline is not a definitive assessment of the business's fundability—it is an assessment of whether the business meets that specific bank's current lending criteria. Many specialist lenders beyond the high-street banks serve businesses that banks decline because of limited trading history, sector restrictions or security.

It depends on the instrument and your corporate structure. Many unsecured business loans require a personal guarantee from directors, whereas invoice finance and asset finance are typically secured against the asset itself. We aim to structure your funding to minimise personal risk exposure wherever possible.

Matching a business to the right investors is not a database lookup. It means filtering several hundred funds, angels, and syndicates by your sector, stage, cheque size, and geography, then checking that each one is still active and investing at your stage. 

The £299 covers that cost. It is not a fee for access to us, nor a deposit against a result. If you go on to take one of our preparation routes, the £299 is credited in full against it, so you pay the route price, not the route price plus £299.

There is no charge at all on the debt route because lenders pay us on completion.

No success fee is charged. The £299 administrative fee is retained, and we provide a full debrief, including investor feedback and specific recommendations for what needs to change to make a future attempt more likely to succeed.

Yes. We have successfully prepared Innovate UK grant and loan applications, as well as applications to a range of other schemes. In most cases, the work starts before the application itself, because Innovate UK assesses the commercial case as heavily as the technology, and that is where most applications are lost. We take you through the business planning and financial modelling first, then build the application on top of it.

Typically three to twelve months from application to payment, depending on the scheme. Competitions run to fixed rounds, so timing often depends on when the next window opens rather than on how quickly you can prepare. If you have less than six months of runway, grant funding will not arrive in time, and we will tell you that rather than take the work.

Sometimes, the two interact, and the interaction can cost you money. Taking a grant can move a project from the SME R&D scheme into RDEC and reduce the value of your claim substantially. The two have to be modelled together before you commit to either. This is one of the most common and most expensive mistakes we see.

Different routes, same principle. US companies have access to federal programmes, including the R&D payroll tax offset and the SBIR and STTR schemes, though these carry ownership and residency requirements that need to be checked against your cap table before you apply. EU-established companies have national agency funding and the European Innovation Council. UK schemes generally require UK registration. We will tell you which stack is available to you based on where your operating entity is actually located.