Granter has secured €1.6M to take its AI grant-writing platform beyond Portugal, bringing its total funding to €2M. The company plans to start with Spain and the German-speaking DACH region of Germany, Austria and Switzerland, with Italy and later the United States also on its list.
Venture firm 3XP Global led the round through its Impact Innovation Fund, which invests under a public venture capital programme managed by Banco Português de Fomento, Portugal’s national development bank. Celtis Venture Partners, Gateway Ventures and American HR software company Deel also took part, along with angel investor Bracken Darrell, the former Logitech chief who now runs clothing group VF Corporation.
Granter was founded in 2023 by chief executive Bernardo Seixas and Bernardo Tavares, who leads technology, and went on to win the PITCH startup competition at Lisbon’s Web Summit in November 2025. The new money will go into product development, international expansion and hiring. The company plans nine hires, mostly in product and engineering, which would take the team from six people to about 15.
“Today, thousands of companies with solid projects are left out of public funding, not for lack of merit,” Seixas said. He argued that many businesses miss out because they lack the time, staff or know-how to handle complex, bureaucratic application processes, and said Granter exists to change that.
From Search To Payment
Granter scans public and private funding databases and checks a company’s eligibility against each programme’s official criteria. The platform then drafts a full application using the organisation’s own information, house rules and past applications, and scores the draft against the funding programme’s criteria to flag gaps. Once a grant is approved, Granter tracks project milestones, keeps progress reports on schedule and prepares the paperwork needed to release payments.
Customers can also use AI Grant Consultant, a chat-based assistant the company recently relaunched, and Granter offers a free trial. The company says work that once took weeks and often needed paid consultants can now be done in under an hour.
Seixas has put the time needed for a traditional public funding application at about 50 hours, against around two hours for clients such as the Portuguese Navy and the Champalimaud Foundation. He has also said such applications typically succeed between 10% and 20% of the time. Subscriptions start at €1,500 a year, and the company plans to add a fee charged when an application succeeds.
Clients, Backers And Next Markets
Granter says it has helped more than 140 businesses apply for over €30M in funding. Its clients include airport operator ANA Aeroportos de Portugal, retail group MC Sonae, energy company Galp, insurer Fidelidade and the Portuguese Navy, whose pilot project is set to expand in 2027. The company says it is focused on small and medium-sized businesses and startups.
By August 2024, Granter had more than 700 registered companies and about 400 applications generated on its platform. Before this round it had raised around €400,000 from Techstars, Mission and the Angels Way fund, which put in €50,000. The company is also working towards ISO 27001, the international standard for information security management.
Granter says it already has investors and early commercial contacts in its target markets, and Gateway Ventures, one of the round’s backers, draws on Austrian and German investors. In each new country, the company plans to add local networks of consultants and databases of national funding calls.
The company’s argument is that paperwork, rather than the quality of a project, keeps many firms away from public money. The new round pays for its first steps beyond its home market, as Granter looks to bring funding search, application writing and project tracking to businesses in Spain and the German-speaking countries.
