Marcus Richards
Claimer makes it easy to access business government incentives.
Every year, governments around the world set aside tens of billions for innovative companies. But, claiming this is not very ‘user friendly’. The rules and requirements are complex, there’s a ton of paperwork, and the schemes are not very well publicised.
Our mission is to make it easy, fast, and inexpensive for small to medium sized businesses to claim the government incentives they are eligible for. Our first product makes claiming UK R&D tax credits a breeze.
Tell us about yourself?
I’m a 2X exited founder. Whilst building a prior startup I discovered claiming R&D relief from HMRC was a massive pain. I reviewed all of the ways I could do it and realised their were no good options.
Whether I used a consultancy, an accountant, or handled it in-house, it was either a massive time drain, risky, or expensive – sometimes all three! I founded Claimer to fix this problem.
If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?
We grew from zero to hundreds of customers organically. This is fantastic in the sense of validating demand for the product. But, as a business, you do not have direct control over it.
Therefore, you need to uncover growth channels you are in control of in order to hit and sustain hypergrowth.
Up until now we haven’t done this – to a fault. In order to discover repeatable and scaleable growth channels, you need time to experiment and iterate. So, we are playing catch up with sales and marketing versus the other functions in the company such as engineering, product, and operations.
What problem does your business solve?
We unlock more time and cognitive bandwidth for the time-poor and problem-rich leaders of startups and scaleups. By removing the headache of claiming R&D relief, it’s once less item they have to worry about on their list of ‘jobs to be done’.
What is the inspiration behind your business?
I co-founded Claimer because I experienced a problem first-hand and wanted to fix it.
At a prior startup, I used a specialist consultancy to claim R&D relief. My assumption was this would make the process easy, but this turned out not to be true. Working with them was like a process from the nineties – endless calls, emails, and spreadsheets. A total headache for myself as CEO and my CTO – who got dragged into it.
After asking other founders and CEOs, this turned out to be pretty normal!
This fired me up to build a solution that fixes the headache of claiming R&D relief for startup founders and scaleup leaders. Right now, we are solving this problem for venture scale companies in the UK.
What is your magic sauce?
Our magic sauce is we are a genuine tech company (the only one in the UK R&D claim space). This enables us to make accessing government incentives easy. It’s not possible without this.
What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?
For the immediate future we’ll be scaling up in the UK R&D claim market. Beyond that, expanding into other countries.
Our vision is to accelerate innovation globally by reinventing access to government incentives. This means unlocking more capital and time for innovative companies in every country possible, enabling them to build faster and more effectively.
What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?
Figuring out how to make claiming R&D tax credits easy for our customers has been a big challenge. Every company we work with has a distinct and unique claim, so we’ve had to build a solution that can cater to every scenario.
When building an early version, it took several huge floor-to-ceiling whiteboards worth of scribbling to figure out how to handle this.
How do people get involved/buy into your vision?
If you’re a funded UK startup or scaleup, get in touch via claimer.com to discover how we can make your next R&D claim pain free.
If you are excited by our mission and love the idea of helping us build Claimer, check out our careers page over at careers.claimer.com.
