The engineering log that got a deep-tech grant approved

What was broken

A deep-tech RF and microwave engineering startup needed a non-dilutive funding path to carry it from prototype to a scalable product, without giving up equity at a stage where the technology, not the company, still carried most of the risk.

What we did

CapEasy shaped the grant application around the scheme’s permitted activities — phased prototype-to-market-entry milestones and a budget built to match them — then built the supporting financial model and aligned the proposal to the scheme’s eligibility rules.

Where it landed

The application was approved for a seed grant through an incubator-backed program. Approval is the incubator committee’s sanction; disbursement follows the scheme’s own due-diligence and compliance milestones and is not guaranteed by the approval itself.

The R&D Tax Incentive is an offset you register for, not a rebate you apply for after the fact

The R&D Tax Incentive splits on one number: aggregated turnover. Under $20 million, the offset is refundable — the corporate tax rate plus an 18.5% premium, paid as cash even where the company has no tax liability yet. At or above $20 million, the offset is non-refundable and tiered: the corporate tax rate plus 8.5% on R&D spend up to 2% of total expenditure, and plus 16.5% on the R&D spend above that 2% intensity line. Engineering businesses building toward a scale-up round should know which side of that threshold a growth year puts them on before the year closes, not after.

Registration is a separate step from the tax return, and it has its own clock: you must register your R&D activities with the Department of Industry, Science and Resources within 10 months of the end of the income year the activities took place in, before the R&D Tax Incentive schedule is lodged with your company tax return. Miss the registration window and the offset is off the table for that year regardless of how good the engineering records are.

The 2026–27 Budget flagged changes to this structure, starting from 1 July 2028 rather than the current filing year. Build the current-year budget on the rates in force now, and check the ATO’s R&D Tax Incentive pages nearer 2028 for the confirmed detail rather than planning around it early.

RF and microwave engineering has its own eligibility test, and its own evidence trail

A core R&D activity is defined by outcome, not effort: experimental work whose result "cannot be known or determined in advance" and that follows a systematic progression — hypothesis, experiment, observation, evaluation, logical conclusions — to produce new knowledge. For an RF or microwave engineering program that reads as specific artefacts, not a narrative: the design hypothesis for an antenna or amplifier topology before the simulation run, the S-parameter sweep and EM-simulation logs that tested it, the prototype build and bench-test data that either confirmed or falsified the hypothesis, and the iteration that followed a failed test. Supporting R&D activities — the fixturing, tooling, or test-rig work around the core experiment — are only eligible where they were undertaken for the dominant purpose of supporting that core activity, so the file has to show which work was the experiment and which was in service of it.

The ATO is explicit that this evidence has to be contemporaneous — created as the work happened, not reconstructed for the claim. Records built after the fact, on their own, are generally not treated as adequate substantiation. For an engineering team the practical version is a project-level log kept alongside the lab notebook: dated design-review notes, simulation run logs with the parameters tested, prototype test results as they came off the bench, and time and cost booked to the project as the work happened rather than allocated retrospectively at claim time.

Beyond the tax offset, sovereign-capability grants run on the same phased-milestone logic

RF and microwave work sits close to defence and communications priorities, which puts it in reach of grant programs that fund the commercialisation step directly rather than through the tax system. The Industry Growth Program pairs an advisory service with grants of $50,000 to $250,000 for early-stage commercialisation and $100,000 to $5,000,000 for growth-stage projects, scoped to National Reconstruction Fund priority areas that include defence capability and enabling capabilities — though the program is currently paused to new applications, so it is a page to watch rather than a live application. The Defence Industry Development Grants Program is open, running in batches across four streams, with its Sovereign Industrial Priorities stream funding up to $1,000,000 at up to 50% of eligible expenditure against the Sovereign Defence Industrial Priorities the guidelines set out for that round.

What both programs ask for at application stage is the same shape of file as the SISFS milestone budget in this engagement: a project broken into phases with a budget matched to each phase, not a lump sum against a general plan. The committee approves the plan; the grant agreement and its milestone reporting are what release the money afterward.