Grants

Our grants expert: GrantTree co-founder Daniel Tenner

My name is Daniel Tenner, and I’ma serial entrepreneur, writer, blogger, speaker, DJ and investor.

After a degree in physics from Oxford, Ijoined the active world first with four years spent in Accenture, where Iworked in a variety of consulting, client-facing roles in financial services. However, in the end, I wasnot satisfied with the humdrum of day-to-day corporate life, and left to start myfirst business, Vocalix. Around the same time, I also startedmyfirst blog.

Vocalix ended up failing fairly rapidly, and I’started a second business, Woobius, which aimed to be base camp for architects, helping the construction industry to collaborate better than existing tools allowed. I worked on Woobius for three years as its technology co-founder and CTO, until it ran out of money, joining the failed startup pool in 2010.

I then used the lessons from Vocalix and Woobius to start a third business, GrantTree, with Paulina Sygulska, aiming this time to solve a tangible problem for other startups, namely how to access government funding. Over the following years, GrantTree would grow from a couple of cofounders to 25 employees, from a handful of clients to a robust client base of over 450 technology companies, ranging from scrappy startups to established enterprises in fields from software to biotech, cleantech, and mechanical engineering.

GrantTree aims to make a difference to its clients and to the innovative segment of the UK’s business landscape, to help spur faster and better innovation by doing things that have a tangible impact on startups and larger companies alike. One of the primary mechanisms we use to do so is funding, from both tax schemes like R&D tax credits, UK government schemes like InnovateUK’s Smart Grants, and EU schemes like Horizon 2020. We love technology and we want to see more awesome technologies getting developed faster.