London fintech Claimer brings in $4.2 million to help firms claim government financing

London-based fintech startup Claimer has raised $4.2 million in a seed round to make it frictionless for companies to claim financial incentives from the government. The new money will allow the company to continue to scale in the U.K. and plan its launch into a second market.

The round was led by Project A Ventures, with participation from Moonfire Ventures, helloworld.vc and a group of tier one angel investors, including Errol Damelin (co-founder of Wonga), Matt Clifford (chairman of Advanced Research and Invention Agency), Ian Hogarth (ex-CEO of SongKick), Harry Briggs (partner at OMERS Ventures) and follow-on investors Ben Holmes (ex-Index Ventures) and TrueSight Ventures.

The current challenging VC market environment is expected to only increase the demand for non-dilutive funding as startups look to maintain their pace of innovation. Despite the governments setting aside billions in innovation incentives for startups and scaleups globally, the barriers to accessing them are high. Whether it's tax credits, grants, or other local tax reliefs, applying for them is difficult. The eligibility criteria and application process are often complex and time-consuming, requiring specialist knowledge that tech companies do not have.

According to the U.K. fintech, it aims to build accessible government financing infrastructure to make the experience of claiming innovation incentives 10x easier. By abstracting away the massively inefficient data entry and communication inefficiencies of R&D tax credits and grant applications, customers are instead given more time, more focus, and more money to build their business.

To date, the company has filed over 700 claims successfully. According to Claimer, companies using its platform can initiate a claim in as little as 10 minutes, whilst having the peace of mind that applications are accurate and maximised. They are typically claiming for complex R&D projects with benefits ranging from £30,000 to £2 million. For doing so, Claimer charges a 5% fee (capped at £10,000) of the claimed relief.

Claimer CEO Adam McCann said: “We’re building Claimer to be the de-facto way for startups and scaleups to claim incentives from the government, starting with R&D tax relief. The R&D claim industry is broken. Our vision is to accelerate innovation globally by eradicating this opacity and complexity between tech companies who need to claim incentives and governments who want to issue them.”

The R&D claim solution has been used by the likes of Otta, Nested, Unmind, and Hubble.

Sam Cash, partner at Project A added: “Research and development is a key driver of economic prosperity and GDP growth. We’re excited to support Claimer in enabling innovative companies to claim R&D relief they’re owed from governments, in a way that is considerably easier and cheaper than current solutions.”