Bearings BetaFunding & opportunities · Liverpool City RegionGet email alerts

Funding & opportunities intelligence engine

About Bearings

Continuously monitored funding, investment, tenders and business support for the Liverpool City Region — each opportunity read to show who it's for.

Public beta

Bearings is in public beta. Everything on the site is live and checked daily, but coverage is still growing: we're adding sources every week, and the "Who's it for?" reading is AI-assisted — always confirm eligibility, amounts and deadlines with the provider before applying (every result links straight to them). During the beta, email alert sign-ups may be limited on busy days; if that happens we save your request and email you as soon as there's room. Spotted something missing or wrong? That's exactly what the beta is for.

What Bearings does

Bearings continuously watches the places where Liverpool City Region businesses and organisations can apply for opportunities — funders, investors, research councils, accelerators, universities, big-tech startup programmes, tender portals and local support providers — and turns what it finds into structured, current, checkable intelligence: what the opportunity is, who it is for, what you get, and when it closes.

Right now it monitors 649 of 659 registered sources and holds 1,920 live opportunities, 1,342 of them verified open. It covers Halton, Knowsley, Liverpool, Sefton, St Helens and Wirral, plus the national and international schemes open to them.

Billions of pounds on offer. A deliberately rough figure: the amounts providers state across 363 contracts and 266 funds, loans and awards, added up. Most of it is tender and framework contract values, which are ceilings (the most a buyer may spend over several years), not guaranteed work — so we don't quote an exact number. Many opportunities state no amount and aren't counted; low-confidence readings are left out; the same fund listed twice counts once.

Advance warning: what's coming before it opens

Bearings also watches for opportunities before they open, so you have time to prepare. Coming soon lists 1,078 planned opportunities: 124 UK funding calls (from the published timeline of UK Research and Innovation, UKRI, pre-announcements and funders' own "opening soon" lists), 290 EU Horizon Europe research calls open to UK organisations, and 664 public contracts in our sectors announced before their tender. 189 open in the next 30 days. When something opens it moves into the main finder and your alerts.

Nothing on Coming soon can be applied for yet, and every card says so. Each shows the opening date (with how many days away, where the funder gives an exact day; otherwise the month), the likely closing date, the award as the funder states it, and who can apply. You can narrow it the same way as the main finder:

Where a buyer is consulting suppliers before a tender, the contract says Act now: talk to the buyer by its date: the one thing you can do today. Any filtered view downloads as a CSV.

Not just grants: every kind of opportunity

Funding is one kind of opportunity among many. Bearings tracks everything a business can apply for, access or win:

485Grants & funding87Investment61Loans & finance750Tenders & contracts37Challenges & competitions126Accelerators & programmes104Advice & mentoring129Training & skills74Facilities, tech & credits34Awards & prizes33Networks & market access

How Bearings works

  1. Watching sources. Every source on What we monitor is checked on its own schedule, and one that fails is shown failing, never silently skipped.
  2. Reading each opportunity. What it is, who can apply, what you get and when it closes, kept only when the provider's own page says so. 3,133 live records have been read this way.
  3. Matching to sectors. Each opportunity, and each public contract, goes to the sectors it actually serves; anything unclear is left out.
  4. Honest numbers. Open means a stated future deadline or rolling applications, and money shown is what one applicant can receive.
  5. Delivered to you. A searchable finder, email alerts for your sectors, and open JSON feeds of everything open now and of what's coming soon. If you'd like to contribute, please let me know.

The sectors we cover

Sector families follow the UK Industrial Strategy growth sectors, each with its main subsectors — including, under Digital and Technologies, tech-company programmes (cloud and AI credits, platform grants, corporate accelerators).

What Bearings is not

Bearings is intelligence, not advice, and not a guarantee of eligibility: always confirm details on the provider's page (every result links straight to it). Providers change and close programmes without notice; the engine catches changes on its next check and publishes its own failures rather than hiding them. It never claims to have found every opportunity — its coverage is the declared source list, and that list is public.

Privacy. Bearings uses no cookies. To improve it we count anonymous totals: page views, which opportunities are clicked, what is searched for and whether alert emails are opened and clicked. None of it is linked to a person, an email address or an IP address. Email alerts store only your address, the choices you made and, if you link a device, your saved list; unsubscribing deletes them.

Bearings is independent and not affiliated with, or endorsed by, any funder or programme it lists. Made by Pete Woodbridge / DreamLab. Bearings started in January 2023 as an open-source community project to help founders, artists and inventors hear about opportunities for their work. Thank you to everyone in our community and to all our GitHub contributors.