Why grants are worth the fight
A grant is the only funding that costs you nothing to take. No equity — unlike the 20–40% of your company VCs expect. No repayments — unlike a bank loan (which rejects half of applicants anyway). No interest. Just money to build the thing you said you'd build.
Governments and foundations hand out billions every year to businesses that create jobs, cut carbon, improve health, strengthen communities, or push technology forward. If your business does any of those things, someone probably wants to fund it.
Why most founders lose
The grant system was designed by administrators, not founders. Three things kill most applications:
1. Applying to the wrong grants
Most founders find grants by googling. They apply to whatever appears first — usually oversubscribed national schemes — and never hear about the regional, sector or foundation grants where their odds are 3–5× better. Matching is half the battle.
2. Writing for themselves, not the assessor
Every funder scores against published criteria. Most applications ignore them and pitch like they're talking to an investor. Assessors don't buy visions — they score answers against a rubric. If your answer doesn't map to the rubric, it scores zero, no matter how good the business is.
3. Burning out on the paperwork
At 40–80 hours per application and a 10–15% hit rate, expected value per hour is brutal. Founders quit after one or two rejections — usually just before they'd have learned enough to win.
How the Fortune Grants Track works
Find — AI matching
You build one funding profile: what you do, where you are, your stage, your impact. Our AI scans live grant programmes — national, regional, sector-specific and foundation — and matches you only with grants where your profile fits the eligibility and the funder's actual scoring priorities.
Match — fit before effort
Every match comes scored: how well you fit, how competitive the round is, what the assessors weight most. You see the odds before you spend a minute writing. No more applying blind.
Win — auto-tailored applications
Fortune drafts your application from your profile, mapped question-by-question to the funder's criteria — impact framed the way this funder scores impact, budget in the format this funder expects. You review, edit, and submit in hours, not weeks.
Who the Grants Track fits best
- Impact founders — community, climate, health, education and social businesses: the causes funders exist to back.
- R&D-heavy startups — innovation grants like Innovate UK Smart Grants, the EIC Accelerator and SBIR/STTR fund technical risk that banks won't touch.
- Pre-revenue businesses — no revenue means no bank loan and no BELOC, but grants don't care about revenue; they care about impact and capability.
Commercial and revenue-generating? You may be better served by the HELOC Track — or use both: grants for R&D, the BELOC for working capital.
The five answers every grant asks for
- The problem — who has it, how big it is, why it matters now.
- Your solution — what's genuinely new or better, in plain language.
- The impact — jobs, emissions, health outcomes, community value: numbers, not adjectives.
- The plan — milestones, timeline, and exactly what the grant buys.
- The team — why you can deliver this, with evidence.
Write these once, well, in your founder's application pack. Every application Fortune drafts starts from them.
Real results
This isn't theory. Before building the platform, our founder personally coached 22 founders through this exact process — they raised $300K+ in grants. The platform automates what worked, and it's already used in 83 countries.