Welcome to Raise Lens
Sustainability funding is fragmented. The money exists. Hundreds of millions of pounds a year flow from agencies like UKRI, Grants.gov, the EU Funding & Tenders Portal, national lottery funds, the World Bank, the DOE, ARIA, and a long tail of climate foundations. But each programme lives on a different portal, with a different login, a different deadline format, and a different idea of what "early stage" means. The result is that founders and small nonprofits spend more time hunting for grants than writing them.
Raise Lens is our attempt to fix that. Every day we pull open calls direct from funder portals, filter them against a strict sustainability relevance taxonomy, and surface what's left as a single searchable feed.
What's in the database today
Across grants, government contracts, and corporate offtake programmes:
- UKRI: UK Research & Innovation opportunities feed
- Grants.gov: US federal grant database (forecasted + posted)
- EU Funding & Tenders Portal: SEDIA open calls
- GOV.UK: Innovate UK, Defra, DESNZ and other UK department feeds
- National Lottery Heritage Fund: UK lottery-funded programmes
- TED: EU public procurement (tenders)
- World Bank: procurement notices, climate investment funds, Project Pipeline
- UNGM, SAM.gov, UK Find a Tender, AusTender, TenderNed: multilateral and country procurement portals
- DOE, ARIA, ARPA-E, Innovate UK: first-of-a-kind deployment and breakthrough R&D funding
- 600+ climate funder profiles: directly tracked foundations, corporate strategics, climate VCs, DFIs, and accelerators
- 15,000+ buyer profiles: corporate offtakers, primes, and procurement bodies with sustainability mandates
The full source list (with last-refreshed timestamps) is on the About page.
Who this is for
If you're an early-stage founder building in carbon capture, biodiversity, circular economy, renewable energy, ocean conservation, sustainable agriculture, climate adaptation, or water, Raise Lens is for you. We weight the feed toward sub-£5M opportunities that don't require an existing track record, and we tag each one with org-type fit (startup, SME, nonprofit, university, local authority) so you can filter quickly.
How it works under the hood
Every record comes from a public API, RSS/Atom feed, or scheduled scrape of the originating funder's own portal. Nothing is bought from third-party aggregators or paywalled directories. After the fetch step, each opportunity is checked against a strict relevance filter that asks one question: is this actually an open grant or contract a sustainability-focused team could apply to? News items, closed calls, technical reports, jobs, and general announcements are all dropped before classification. Past-deadline records auto-expire daily.
What survives gets tagged against 32 sector slugs from a hand-curated taxonomy: renewable energy, carbon removal, regenerative agriculture, ocean blue economy, electric mobility, and so on. Output is hard-filtered against that vocabulary so a record is only labelled with a sector when the call genuinely targets it. Spurious tags from older iterations get cleaned up when we tighten the rules.
What's next
Saved searches, email alerts on new matches, and a writeup tool that drafts your first-pass application using the funder's actual evaluation criteria are all live and behind a paywall for active subscribers. The weekly blog publishes data-driven roundups every Monday: grants closing this month, new programmes added, where past awards actually went. If there's a source you rely on that we don't yet cover, get in touch at [email protected].