When we started Grants Hub, the pitch was simple: UK funding information is scattered across hundreds of websites, most of it out of date, and nobody should have to spend twenty hours a week reading PDF guidelines to find out they were never eligible in the first place.
Two numbers have moved a long way since then.
Over 4,000 live grants, from over 1,500 funders
Grants Hub now tracks more than 4,000 live UK grants and funding programmes, drawn from over 1,500 distinct funders across 100+ monitored sources. Every one of those sources is re-checked daily.
Much of the recent growth has come from the long tail: the smaller UK charitable trusts and foundations that most directories cover badly, because they have no listing anywhere except their own website and some have no website at all. That gap matters more than it sounds. For a small charity, a £5,000 grant from a local trust is often far more winnable than a £500,000 national programme — and it's the one nobody else is telling you about.
Why "updated daily" is the number that actually matters
A larger database is not automatically a better one. A directory with 8,000 grants in it, a third of which closed last year, is worse than a smaller one you can trust.
This is the failure mode we care most about avoiding. Every funder we track is checked daily, closed rounds are taken down, and amounts and deadlines are confirmed against the funder's own page rather than left as whatever was true when the entry was first written. It's unglamorous work, and it's most of what we do.
What's next: matching that shows its working
Right now, when Grants Hub matches your organisation to a grant, it does it on what the funder says — the published eligibility criteria, sector, region, organisation type, and the language of the funding call itself, compared against your profile.
That works. But it only ever sees the funder's own description of what they fund, which is not always the same as what they actually fund.
So we've been building the other half. Grants Hub has now loaded 458,000 historic UK grant awards — real, already-awarded funding going back to 1993, representing over £74 billion, sourced from 360Giving publishers, Innovate UK, UKRI, NIHR and Horizon Europe.
Over the coming weeks that dataset gets wired into the matching engine, where it will do two jobs:
A second opinion when the criteria are thin. Plenty of funders publish two vague paragraphs and nothing else. Where the stated criteria don't give the matching engine enough to work with, the record of what that funder has actually backed — what kind of organisations, at what size, in which regions — becomes the fallback signal.
Evidence for why a match is a match. This is the part we're most interested in. A relevance score out of 100 tells you nothing you can act on. "This funder has previously awarded to organisations like yours, at roughly this scale, in your region" is a reason — one you can sanity-check yourself, and one you can use when you decide whether a given application is worth the week it will take to write.
The point isn't the AI. The point is that you should be able to see why something was put in front of you, and disagree with it.
Where this is going
The ambition is straightforward, and we'd rather state it plainly than dress it up: we're building towards the most sophisticated grant matching platform in the UK. Not the biggest list — the one that is most likely to put the right handful of grants in front of the right organisation, and to explain itself while doing it.
Daily-refreshed data was the first layer. Semantic matching on funder criteria was the second. Matching informed by nearly half a million real funding decisions is the third, and it's the one that starts in the next few weeks.
Finding funding on Grants Hub
Grants Hub monitors 4,000+ live UK grants and funding programmes from 1,500+ funders across 100+ sources, refreshed daily. You can filter by sector, region, organisation type and amount, or build an organisation profile and let the matching engine do it for you. We take 0% commission on anything you win.