Business Grants in Northern Ireland
Northern Ireland offers unique business funding opportunities through Invest NI, local councils, and cross-border programmes with the Republic of Ireland. Belfast and other NI businesses can access support for innovation, exports, and growth.
Invest NI Funding
Invest Northern Ireland is the main business development agency for NI. They provide grants, loans, and support for businesses looking to grow, innovate, or export. Their programmes cover R&D, capital investment, skills development, and market entry.
Local Council Support
Northern Ireland's 11 councils offer their own business support programmes. Belfast City Council, Derry City and Strabane, and other councils run grant schemes for local businesses, particularly SMEs and startups.
Cross-Border Programmes
NI businesses can also access cross-border funding programmes with the Republic of Ireland and EU-funded initiatives. InterTradeIreland supports cross-border trade and innovation projects.
Northern Ireland Business Grants
151 grants found
Funding opportunity: CoSTAR Showcase Labs: Createch infrastructure and commercialisation
Join the Convergent Screen Technologies and performance in Realtime (CoSTAR) Network and host national research and development (R&D) infrastructure for the creative sector to reduce barriers to creative businesses’ technology adoption, improve commercialisation support, and drive scale up and investment.
Funding opportunity: CoSTAR Satellite Labs: Accessible creative R&D infrastructure
Join the Convergent Screen Technologies and performance in Realtime (CoSTAR) Network and host national research and development (R&D) infrastructure for the creative sector to reduce barriers to creative businesses’ technology adoption, improve commercialisation support, and drive scale up and investment.
Pre-announcement: Expanding access to creative sector R&D infrastructure
Join the convergent screen technologies and performance in realtime (CoSTAR) Network and host national R&D infrastructure for the creative sector. Funding aims to reduce barriers to creative businesses' technology adoption, improve commercialisation support for creative technology businesses, and drive scale up and investment.
Collaborate with the UK Human Functional Genomics Initiative
Apply for an Academic and Industry Partnership award as part of the UK Human Functional Genomics Initiative’s (FGx) Innovation and Collaboration fund. The awards will enable the development of links between industrial partners and the FGx. These awards can be used to support feasibility, pilot or initial studies to provide preliminary experiments to explore ideas and generate initial data which could support the development of competitive collaborative grant proposals for longer term projects.
Focal award: EPSRC and MHCLG Fire Engineering Skills Hub
Funding for a skills hub to deliver high quality, cohort based doctoral training, and design of high-quality postgraduate level taught programmes in fire engineering.
EPSRC-Defra Reimagining Circularity: full stage
Funding to develop a NetworkPlus that builds new capacity, strengthens community, and enhances research to innovation capabilities focused on the circular economy in data and metrics, or textiles, using the 'Plus' element to accelerate impact.
UKRI: Integration of AI/HPC with quantum computing
Apply for funding to expose and overcome critical bottlenecks associated with the implementation of quantum computing within classical computational workflows. This investment will strengthen the UK’s capability to achieve accessible, UK-based quantum computers that deliver benefits beyond classical supercomputers across key sectors of the economy.
DRIVE35 Scale-up Fund drawdown five
UK registered organisations can apply for a share of up to £150 million to create scale up manufacturing facilities for zero emission vehicle technologies. DRIVE35 (Driving Research and Investment in Vehicle Electrification) is a BIST-led programme aimed at transforming the UK’s automotive industry.
UKRI translation: MRC proof of concept: stage two
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).
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.
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.
Frequently Asked Questions
Common questions about business grants in Northern Ireland