A private AI demonstration · UK grant funding
Grant Chat
The public record of UK grants, except you can just ask it who funds work like yours.
Somewhere in the public grants data is a funder who backs exactly your kind of work, in your area, at the size you need. You just haven't found them yet.
Grant Chat puts a plain-English chat in front of the whole record, more than 300 funders and nearly a million grants, so you can ask it a question the way you'd ask a colleague and see the funders you should be talking to, including the ones you've never thought to approach.
It is also a working example of the kind of private AI I build for charities, so it is worth saying up front how it runs.
How it works, and why that matters
Grant Chat runs on open weights in my own AWS account. Your questions are never sent to ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or any other outside service. The data it answers from is public, and every answer is traceable to the exact database query that produced it, so nothing is taken on trust.
That last part is the whole idea. Grants data is public, so I can show you the queries openly here. The same build, an assistant sitting next to a read-only copy of your records and answering in plain English, works just as well on the data you cannot make public: your pipeline, your donor list, your finance export. With private AI, none of it leaves your control.
Find funders, not deadlines
Grant Chat is built on grants that have already been awarded, so it won't tell you a fund is open today or chase a deadline. What it does well is more useful: it shows you which funders fund your kind of work, on the evidence of what they have actually paid for. A funder who has backed your cause before is your warmest prospect, and those are the ones most charities are missing.
See what it can do
Each example below starts with something a real fundraiser is trying to find out, then shows the question they'd put to Grant Chat. You can see the query it wrote running underneath each answer, so you can always check the working. Some answers come back as a chart you can read at a glance. Nothing is staged: these are the answers the grants record actually gives.
Find funders by cause and place
The core of prospect research: who funds your kind of work, in your area, on the evidence of grants actually made.
You're fundraising for a homelessness project in Greater Manchester and want the funders worth approaching, the ones who have actually backed this work locally, with the amounts they gave.
You'd ask Grant Chat:
"Which funders have given grants to homelessness projects in Greater Manchester, and how much?"
You run an environmental charity in Wales and want the funders who back that work, and you'd rather see the biggest at a glance than read down a list.
You'd ask Grant Chat:
"Which funders have given the most to environmental projects in Wales? Show me the top ten as a bar chart."
Read a funder in seconds
Everything one funder has paid for, on a single screen, instead of trawling their accounts.
You're about to apply to a particular funder and want the picture fast: who they back, how much they give, and what for.
You'd ask Grant Chat:
"Show me everything Trust for London funded last year: who, how much, and what for."
Find funders the right size
Match funders to what you can realistically ask for, on the typical grant they give rather than their biggest headline cheque.
You're a small charity and a six-figure funder isn't a realistic prospect. You want the funders whose normal grant is about your size.
You'd ask Grant Chat:
"Which funders give grants around £10,000 to small charities, not six-figure cheques?"
See what your peers got that you didn't
Charities like yours have been funded by trusts you may never have written to. Grant Chat finds them.
You want to learn from organisations doing similar work to yours: which funders have backed them, so you can see the trusts you've been missing.
You'd ask Grant Chat:
"Which trusts have funded food banks in the last three years, and which give most often?"
A note on coverage
The data covers funders who publish openly to the 360Giving standard, so it's a large and growing slice of UK grant making, not every funder. Grant Chat is an early beta, more experiment than finished product. It finds funders, not open deadlines, and it reads the grants record, not the charity register, so it won't tell you a charity's income or trustees.
Want to try it yourself?
Grant Chat is not open to the public, and there is no sign-up form. Every question it answers runs real AI in my own account, so each one costs me a little to run. That is money well spent when it is genuinely helping someone in the sector, and not really the point if it is just idle curiosity.
So I give access to people working in the UK charity sector who will get real use out of it. If that is you, the quickest way in is to connect with me on LinkedIn and tell me briefly what you would use it for, and I'll set you up with a login. Not on LinkedIn? Email me with the same.
Or, if you'd rather not have an account at all and there's just one funder question you'd like answered, email me the question. I'll run it through Grant Chat myself and send you back what it finds.
Built on grants data published by funders to the 360Giving standard, the large majority under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence or the Open Government Licence v3.0. With thanks to 360Giving and the funders who publish openly. Coverage is among 360Giving publishers, not every UK funder. Figures are a snapshot, not live. Data as of June 2026.