Trends and Priorities for Innovation Grant Funding for HealthTech in the UK.
Quick Introduction
Health and Life Science grant funding (healthtech grant funding) in the UK remains a priority. Understanding the trends in recent years can help startups, scaleups and mid-caps improve the chance of winning impactful funding. This blog is for founders, CEOs, CFOs and Innovation managers working in the health and life science sector.
Headlines – HealthTech Grant Funding
We took a look at the UK’s flagship health and life science grant fund; Innovate UK Biomedical Catalyst. Through a series of Freedom of Information requests, we can bring you the trends in grant funding awards from 2023 to 2026, and make some predictions for HealthTech funding in the UK from 2027 onwards.
Innovate UK’s Biomedical Catalyst grant is split into two streams:
- Small: up to £500k grant funding per project (sole applications)
- Large: £500k to £2m grant funding (collaborative applications)
Application Numbers Have Surged
The most obvious trend in the data is the rapid growth in applications across both large and small project streams.
| Applications Submitted | |||
| 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | |
| Small | 219 | 314 | 654 |
| Large | 138 | 170 | 347 |
The increase between 2024 and 2025 is particularly striking. Small project demand more than doubled in a single year from 314 to 654 applications. Large project applications also doubled from 170 to 347. This suggests the Biomedical Catalyst has become one of the most heavily oversubscribed innovation funding programmes in the UK.
Funding Volumes Have Stayed Relatively Flat
While application numbers increased dramatically, the number of funded projects changed very little.
| Applications Funded | |||
| 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | |
| Small | 24 | 34 | 37 |
| Large | 9 | 8 | 8 |
Although small project awards increased slightly, the growth is minimal compared with the explosion in application demand. This means competition intensity has risen significantly.
Success Rates Have Collapsed
The combination of rising demand and stable funding volumes has caused success rates to fall sharply.
| Success Rates | |||
| 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | |
| Small | 11% | 10.8% | 5.7% |
| Large | 6.5% | 4.7% | 2.3% |
For large projects, the probability of success in 2025 was roughly one-third of the 2023 level. For small projects, the success rate halved between 2024 and 2025 alone. The 2025 competition environment was therefore materially more difficult than previous years.
More Projects Are Achieving High Scores
Another important trend is the increasing number of applications achieving scores above the 70% threshold.
| Applications Scoring >70% | |||
| 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | |
| Small | 124 | 194 | 363 |
| Large | 106 | 122 | 191 |
This indicates that the quality of applications is also rising. But funding volumes have not increased proportionally. In 2025 363 small projects scored above 70%, but only 37 were funded. This suggests that many strong applications are now being rejected despite achieving what would traditionally be considered competitive assessment scores.
Portfolio-Based Selection Is Becoming More Important
One of the most revealing indicators in the dataset relates to projects funded despite receiving lower scores than rejected applications.
| Applications approved with lower scores | |||
| 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | |
| Small | 0 | 21 | 7 |
| Large | 1 | 0 | 2 |
The most notable figure is in 2024 small projects, where 21 lower-scoring applications were funded ahead of higher-scoring unfunded proposals. This reflects Innovate UK’s “portfolio approach”, where funding decisions are not based solely on rank order scoring. The Profolio Approach considers: strategic alignment, market diversity, technology balance, therapeutic focus, and overall portfolio composition. The data suggests that Innovate UK’s Portfolio Approach is becoming increasingly influential as application pressure rises.
Summing Up HealthTech Grant Funding in the UK in 2026
Applications are up, success rates are down. This is in line with sector trends across grant funding in the UK (and EU in our experience). The highest score is no longer the key to securing grant funding in the UK. A panel of 5 in a Portfolio Meeting have a role to play in making final deciaions, and lower scoring applications can more often expect to be awarded funding now than 3 years ago.
How are we advising our clients in the HealthTech sector to be successful in grant funding?
Funding strategy becomes more critical, not optional. It is no long viable to ‘chuck in a grant application and hope for success. It is a fools hope, Grant funding strategy means aligning your company and innovation with government policy, societal needs and funder’s strategic outcomes. Grant funding strategy means spreading the risk across multiple grant funding calls and taking a medium-term view of grant funding. Reusing and repurposing high-quality grant applications has become essential to stand a chance of successful securing R&D grant funding for HealthTech, and more broadly for innovative SMEs in the UK and Europe.
Want to understand how our team can help your company set R&D grant funding strategy and execute on that plan? We are happy to arrange an online meeting to explore further.
Alex Chalkley
I have over 20 years experience in founding and scaling businesses, mainly focused on the non-dilutive funding sector. Since 2008, I have built, trained and mentored teams to successfully draw down over €100m in non-dilutive funding from the UK and EU for clients spanning multiple sectors.
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