This is an introduction to Subsdy, a grant discovery platform, and to the way its agent can be used to find funding. The use case is deliberately broad: finding a grant for your company, for your research, for a scholarship if that is what you are looking for, or for an NGO.
Why a Searchable Database Matters
The practical reason for using it is convenience. You can paste in a short bio or a short description of what you do, add the amount of funding you are looking for, and then let the agent work through the entire database on your behalf.
That matters more than it might sound, because of the sheer volume involved. There are usually well over a thousand active grants and tenders on the EU Funding and Tenders Portal at any given time. That is far too much to look through manually, and nobody realistically does. Having a database you can simply talk to is very convenient by comparison.
Beyond Search
Search is only part of it. There is a lot of rich data attached to every single grant and every single tender in the system, and several features are built on top of it.
You can follow keywords, so that new calls matching your area surface automatically. You can follow specific grants and track them as they develop. You can look for partners, which is a recurring need for collaborative calls. And you can create a public profile on every single grant page, which makes it a good way to find partners rather than only to find funding.
Search That Reads Everything, Not Just Titles
The direct search runs across the whole database rather than across call titles. Searching for EIC, for example, returns the EIC STEP Scale Up call, the Step 1 short proposal, the EIC defence call and Transition, with the most relevant results at the top and relevance falling away further down the list.
That breadth is deliberate. Searching only titles would miss the many calls that reference a programme without naming it in the heading, so the search covers all of the data, the web research and the rich material attached to each entry. The aim is a very broad result set with the most relevant entries surfaced first, rather than a narrow set of exact matches.
What Sits on a Grant Page
Opening a single grant shows how much material is held per call. Each page carries a short structured summary at the top, followed by extensive detail, footnotes and rich data, all of it freely available.
The original documents are attached directly and can be downloaded straight from the page, taken as they are from the Funding and Tenders Portal. There is also a link through to the original call page, which is useful mainly as a comparison: the official site is extremely slow, with very little caching, which is a large part of why building a faster layer on top of it made sense in the first place.
Each page also carries a second layer of suggestions in the sidebar. These are semantically similar grants and programmes, identified with AI rather than by category matching, which makes it straightforward to move sideways from one relevant call to the next.
Tracking Changes Without Watching for Them
Following a grant means email notification whenever it updates, and followed calls collect into your own list that can be pruned at any time. Keyword following works the same way at a broader level. Adding fellowship as a keyword produces an email whenever a new grant is added that mentions the word anywhere, and the same applies to EIC, Pathfinder or anything else worth watching.
The updates page shows what has recently been added or changed across grants and tenders. Where it becomes genuinely useful is the version history on individual calls. If a deadline moves you get an email, but you can also see the full change log, rendered as a difference in red and green showing exactly what was removed and what was added. That granularity matters because calls do quietly change, and removed eligibility criteria are the kind of edit that is easy to miss and expensive to discover late.
A calendar view covers the same ground from the deadline side, showing what closes over the coming weeks so that a date such as the ninth of September resolves immediately into the specific calls closing on it.
Alongside that sits a news section, published periodically as an editorial selection rather than a complete feed. The most recent post covered forty-eight newly added grants out of roughly two to three hundred added in that period, filtered down to the ones worth attention.
Finding Partners
Partner profiles are attached to individual calls rather than kept in a separate directory. On any given grant you can see who has already created a profile, which for an open EIC Transition call might be a small number of organisations, and read what each is offering.
The mix is what makes it useful. Some profiles belong to applicants looking for consortium members, some to consultants offering services, and some to organisations looking for support. Creating your own profile on a call is free, and it is required before you can message anyone else on that call.
The Agent
The earlier route through the platform was to create a project and generate matches against it, producing around one hundred and fifty matches per project. The agent replaces that with something simpler: a chatbot you talk to.
It works in two modes. It can find new grants, and it can discuss specific grants that are already in front of you. In practice you give it a profile in plain language, for example a for-profit business accelerator based in Germany looking for between five hundred thousand and ten million euros to support early stage companies. The agent first checks whether it has enough detail to search at all. If a country or a clear description of what you are looking for is missing, it asks for it before spending a match, and the monthly allowance of sixteen matches is generous enough that this is rarely a constraint.
Matching itself takes about three minutes. The agent works out the scope, settles on a search approach, and then scores every single grant in the database semantically against the request before presenting the strongest results. A typical run returns around twenty-five results, each with a relevance score and a short explanation of why it is interesting: eighty-six percent, eighty-two percent, eighty percent, seventy-eight percent and so on down the list.
A second query for a Spanish agricultural technology company, deliberately run without naming the country to see whether the agent would ask, returned an eighty-five percent match on resilience of agriculture in water and nutrient scarce environments, along with further agricultural calls and a grant on AI supporting informed advice for farmers.
The results are not the end of the conversation. Individual grants can be added into the chat with a single click, after which you can ask why they match your profile and, more usefully, what might not match. The agent quotes directly from the underlying documents, explaining where a call is a direct fit and where it is not, covering the questions that actually decide eligibility: whether you must apply as a consortium or can apply as a single beneficiary, whether the size of the ask is in the right range, and whether the funding is dilutive or non-dilutive.
Because the agent holds the full content of each call in its context, you do not need to be precise when referring to one. A partial name is enough for it to work out which call you mean, and a copied grant ID works just as well. It can also see recent changes, including whether a deadline has moved.
What the Agent Gets Right, and What It Cannot Fix
The matching currently focuses on grants, meaning non-dilutive funding, which is what most people are looking for. Tenders are covered by a separate matching feature.
The honest caveat is about EU funding rather than about the tool. Matching is always somewhat hit and miss, because the rules can be very restrictive and the calls are written around the Commission's priorities rather than around your project. You will never find a call that describes your company exactly. What you find instead is something close, and the work is then to adjust the project so that it genuinely fits the call. That is normal, and it is the part no search can do for you.
With that understood, the recommendation is straightforward: run a few agent searches. If a grant for your work exists anywhere in the EU, it is in there to be found.
