Business Grants in the East Midlands
The East Midlands provides business funding through local councils, the regional Growth Hub, and various LEP programmes. The region has strengths in manufacturing, logistics, and food production.
D2N2 Growth Hub
The D2N2 Growth Hub covers Derby, Derbyshire, Nottingham, and Nottinghamshire. They provide free business support and can connect you with grant funding for growth and innovation projects.
Leicester and Leicestershire
Leicester City Council and the LLEP offer business support programmes. The area has particular strengths in textiles, space and satellite technology, and food manufacturing.
County Council Grants
Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire, and Rutland each have county-level business support through their councils. Rural business grants are often available alongside more general SME support.
East Midlands Business Grants
212 grants found
Invite only: Precision prevention: biological mechanisms of response variation
Apply for funding to investigate why biomedical prevention interventions work differently across people. Projects must generate mechanistic evidence in humans by testing biomedical experimental interventions or challenges in pre-disease or early disease states, providing insight into how to improve the targeting and effectiveness of precision prevention strategies.
Large Grant full applications: November 2026 (invite only)
Funding to support innovative, large-scale and complex projects that tackle big science questions and have the potential to produce world-leading research.
Energy Resilience Accelerator – helping SMEs scale their resilience innovations
A programme designed to connect ambitious SMEs with industry partners (Centrica, NHS England, NESO, NGED, SSEN) to collaboratively develop trial proposals tackling pressing energy resilience challenges, with fully funded technical and business support and potential trial funding.
Transformative sustainable AI technologies
Apply for funding for projects focused on speculative and high-risk research with the potential to deliver high rewards and a step change in the sustainability of future AI systems. Projects should consider technological innovations across the AI stack.
Frontier AI: SME Champions, phase 1
Feasibility studies for frontier artificial intelligence, and machine learning technologies with a clear route to defensible scale-up.
Teacher Development Fund
Supports schools and arts organisations working in equal partnership to deliver professional learning for teachers, enabling arts-based approaches that create equitable classrooms for primary-age children.
Second Act Entrepreneur Fund
A grant funding and mentorship initiative aimed at supporting UK business owners and aspiring entrepreneurs aged 40 and over to start or grow their business.
Exploring the frontiers of environmental research 2026
Apply for funding to pursue truly novel curiosity-driven environmental research that is at an early stage of development and has the potential to be transformative. Projects should focus on preliminary investigation that may inform future activities and applicants should articulate the potential for impact of the project outcomes.
Efficient, Structured and Controllable AI Systems
UK registered SME businesses can apply for a share of up to £1.66 million to deliver experimental validation of prototype AI systems for novel reusable components of efficient, structured and controllable learning systems.
MDI programme innovation and scale-up hub
UK registered eligible organisations can apply for a share of up to £4 million for a manufacturing digitalisation innovation (MDI) and scale-up hub to improve the targeting, quality and commercial impact of grant funded activity.
UKRI Translation: MRC Proof of Concept: stage one
Apply for funding to develop and test novel therapeutics, medical devices, diagnostics and other interventions across any stage of the developmental pathway, from prototype development, through pre-clinical refinement, to early-phase clinical studies (up to phase 2a).
Bioinformatics and Biological Resources Fund (26BBR)
Apply for funding to implement, improve or consolidate bioinformatics or biological resources in support of UK bioscience, helping to drive forwards progress in bioscience research and innovation. Your project must focus on the delivery of a community resource that addresses a significant demand or supports an established user base in the biosciences.
Frequently Asked Questions
Common questions about business grants in East Midlands