Funding · Powered by Swoop

Fuel for your startup — loans, grants and finance in one search.

Our funding portal — powered by Swoop — matches your business against 1,000+ providers of loans, grants and finance. One profile, the whole market, no obligation.

Open the funding portal Talk it through first

How it works

From 'we need money' to real offers

1
Build one profile
Ten minutes on the portal — who you are, what you need the money for, roughly how much.
2
See your matches
Swoop's engine checks 1,000+ funding providers and shows what your business is actually likely to get — with no hard credit search.
3
Sense-check with us
Before you accept anything, we look at the true cost against your numbers. Cheap headline rates with expensive strings get caught here.
4
Get funded
Apply to the option you choose, with your paperwork and figures already in order — which is exactly what lenders want to see.

What's on the market

The funding most startups never hear about

Start Up Loans: Government-backed personal loans of £500–£25,000 per founder for businesses trading under five years — fixed 7.5% interest and free mentoring. How start-up loans work.
Grants: Innovation, regional and sector grants that don't dilute you and don't need repaying — the catch is finding them, which is what the portal is for. What grants actually exist.
Working capital: Overdraft alternatives, revolving credit and revenue-based finance to smooth the gap between paying suppliers and getting paid. Working capital explained.
Asset & equipment finance: Spread the cost of kit, vehicles and machinery instead of burning runway on day-one purchases. Asset finance explained, with a calculator.
R&D-linked funding: If you're building something genuinely new, R&D tax relief and advances against it can fund a meaningful slice of development.
Equity readiness: Thinking about angels or VCs? We get your numbers investor-grade first — clean accounts, a defensible forecast and a data room that doesn't embarrass you. When you're ready to be seen, Find Investment is a platform where certified investors approach founders rather than the other way round.

Debt or equity

The same £40,000, two very different prices

Illustrative. The point is not that one is better — it is that they price completely differently and suit opposite situations.
	A Start Up Loan	Selling 10% of the company
What you give up	Nothing. You keep the whole company.	A tenth of everything the company ever becomes.
What it costs	About £8,090 in interest over five years at the fixed 7.5%.	If the company is worth £4m at exit, that 10% cost you £400,000.
Who carries the risk	You do, personally. It is a loan to you, not to the company, and it survives the company.	The investor does. If it fails they lose their money and you owe nothing.
When it is right	The money buys something with a visible return — stock that turns, kit that earns, a hire with measurable output.	The work is genuinely unproven and years from revenue, where fixed monthly repayments would kill you.
How long it takes	Four to eight weeks including the plan and forecast.	Realistically six months from first conversation to money in the bank.

How to choose

Founders reach for equity because it feels like free money and debt feels frightening. It is usually the other way round. Equity is the most expensive money you will ever take, and the bill arrives years later when the company is worth something. Debt is cheap, boring and repayable — right up until the month revenue does not arrive, which is exactly why it is wrong for genuinely unproven work.

What they actually look at

Lenders and investors are asking different questions

A lender is underwriting repayment. They want to see that the money coming in covers the money going out, with room to spare, in most months. That means clean, current accounts, a cashflow forecast that survives a sceptic, and — for a Start Up Loan — your personal credit file, because it is personal borrowing. What kills applications is not a weak idea, it is unexplained gaps and numbers that do not reconcile to the bank statements.

An investor is underwriting the upside. They are asking whether this could be worth a great deal more than it is now, and whether you are the person to do it. The numbers matter less in absolute terms and far more in what they reveal: whether you know your unit economics, whether the forecast has any relationship to the last six months, and whether the cap table and share structure are clean enough to invest into without a fortnight of legal work.

The overlap is smaller than founders expect, which is why the same pack rarely works for both. What does serve both is having the numbers straight in the first place — and that is the part we do.

Two honest warnings

Things the funding industry does not lead with

The open innovation grant is gone. Innovate UK’s Smart Grants — the sector-agnostic competition that funded a great many UK startups at around £300,000 — has been paused since January 2025, with no rounds since. What remains on the UKRI funding finder is mostly sector-specific, or gated behind an approved investor partner. Anyone still telling you to build a plan around a Smart Grant is working from an old map.

A personal guarantee is a real cost, not a formality. It removes the protection the limited company exists to give you. Most early-stage bank lending asks for one, and Start Up Loans are personal borrowing by design. Before signing, establish what is actually guaranteed: the whole facility or a capped amount, whether it is joint and several with your co-founders, and what happens to it if you leave.

Where to get help Start Up Loans explained

Funding questions

Asked all the time

What is the Buzz funding portal?

It's our white-label version of Swoop, one of the UK's leading business-funding platforms. You build one profile and it matches you against 1,000+ lenders, grant schemes and equity providers.

Does searching affect my credit score?

No. Exploring your matches is a soft search — a full credit check only happens if you choose to proceed with a specific lender's application.

What kind of funding can it find?

Start-up loans, government-backed schemes, working capital and revenue-based finance, asset finance, innovation grants, R&D-linked lending and introductions towards equity investment — matched to your stage and sector. Found Funding, our sister brand and another trading name of Buzz Accounting, explains each product in more depth and has free calculators for most of them.

Does it cost anything to use?

No — searching and seeing your matches is free with no obligation. If you take funding, the provider's normal terms apply, and we'll help you sanity-check them first.

Will you help me choose?

Yes. That's the point of having an accountant in the loop — we'll look at the real cost of each option against your cashflow before you sign anything.