Adam McCann, Co-founder and CEO at Claimer, notes that he’s pleased to announce they’ve raised a $4.2m seed, led by Project A Ventures, with participation from Moonfire Ventures, and helloworld.vc.
A group of angels also contributed to the investment round. They reportedly “include Matt Clifford (EF, Chairman, Advanced Research and Invention Agency), Errol Damelin (co-founder, Wonga), Ian Hogarth (ex-CEO, SongKick), Harry Briggs (Partner, OMERS Ventures) and follow-on investors Ben Holmes (ex-Index Ventures) and TrueSight Ventures.”
As noted in the update, advancements in technology have “made the human experience astronomically better since the industrial revolution.”
But the world is “up against massive global challenges this century, and the research & development required to develop technology to push us forward is risky, expensive, and takes time to work out.”
Venture capital has “been a big financier of technological innovation in recent decades, but this isn’t enough.” VC needs “to make a return, so much of it has a low risk tolerance to unproven technology.”
But government incentives, to the tune of $1tn globally, “actually rewards these risky bets whether they make a return or not.” As noted by Claimer’s management, that’s “more than all the venture capital deployed in the U.S. and Europe combined.”
The way they’re setup and utilized is “deeply fragmented and complex,” the company’s management claims.
As a result, whole unregulated industries of accountants and consultants “has spawned to capitalize on this complexity, aggressively competing with each other to advise businesses on how to identify and apply for the incentives they’re eligible for.”
Being unregulated, accountants and consultants “vary wildly in their competency, are hugely inefficient, and charge eye-watering fees.”
According to the firm, it’s total madness, and “an unnecessary overhead for the world’s innovators.”
An example: the problem with UK R&D tax relief
The economics just don’t make sense to have a service that’s easy, reliable, and inexpensive.
- Not Easy: claims require a great deal of specific information. This means tons of back and forth with calls, spreadsheets, and Word templates. There are a few mostly DIY platforms that exist, but these still require hours of data entry.
- Not Reliable: the majority of accountants and R&D specialists lack the necessary technical and tax specialization to produce correct R&D claims, inadvertently leaving their startups and scaleup clients exposed to penalties and and drawn-out enquiries down the line, a significant risk from this year.
- Costly: The few specialists that can produce correct R&D claims need to employ expensive tax specialists and experienced engineers to produce claims, so must charge high fees.
Claimer’s vision is bold: “to accelerate innovation globally by reinventing access to government incentives.”
Starting with R&D tax credits in the UK, Claimer is “making the experience 10x easier, more reliable, and less expensive.”
Are you organizing the R&D claim for your company? Claimer “needs just 10 minutes of your time, with zero data entry. It’s a game changer.”
To date they’ve maximized “the claims of 350+ venture scale startups like Nested, Otta, Hubble, and Unmind.” £millions person-hours and fees saved. And that’s “with zero claim rejections or reductions.”
Ironically this is “only made possible by the R&D work [their] talented team has done over more than a year.”
Their technology “leverages a company’s internal and cloud data to hugely reduce data entry and back and forth.” The same tech also helps ensure their in-house expert team “only does valuable work.”
This funding will support their growth in the UK market, and “in the near future, other markets.”
In the long term, Claimer claims it will “unblock the flow of billions of dollars of capital from government schemes into the bank accounts of startups and scaleups – the companies building our future – giving them predictable, fast, and reliable access to much-needed funding.”