What it takes to get a health-tech grant approved — and paid

What was broken

A deep-tech firm working on patient-facing health monitoring needed funding to advance product development.

What we did

CapEasy prepared the seed fund proposal — product milestones, a utilisation plan, and multi-year financials — and aligned the application to the scheme’s eligibility and permitted-activity rules.

Where it landed

The firm secured a public seed fund approval. A seed fund approval is the incubator committee’s sanction; actual disbursement follows the scheme’s due-diligence and compliance milestones and is not guaranteed.

The R&D Tax Incentive rewards expenditure you can prove, not activity you can describe

The R&D Tax Incentive (R&DTI) is a self-assessed program run jointly by the ATO and the Department of Industry, Science and Resources: you register your R&D activities with AusIndustry, then claim the offset in your company tax return. For a company with aggregated turnover under $20 million, the offset is refundable and equals the corporate tax rate plus an 18.5 percentage-point premium. Above $20 million turnover, the offset is non-refundable and tiered by R&D intensity — an 8.5 percentage-point premium on notional R&D expenditure up to 2% of total expenditure, and 16.5 percentage points above that, with the offset dropping to the company tax rate for any notional R&D deduction over $150 million in a year. These rates apply to income years starting from 1 July 2021 and are unchanged going into FY2027; the government has flagged reforms starting 1 July 2028, which is a program-design question for your registered tax agent to watch, not something to plan around today.

The registration deadline is fixed and unforgiving: you must register each income year’s R&D activities with AusIndustry within 10 months of that income year ending, before your tax agent can lodge the claim. Health monitoring device work is exactly the kind of activity the program is built for — new hardware, firmware, or a diagnostic algorithm with an outcome that could not have been known or determined in advance — but "core R&D activity" and "supporting R&D activity" are defined terms, and a self-assessment that mislabels routine software maintenance or regulatory testing as R&D is the single most common reason a claim gets reviewed.

MRFF money for health-tech mostly arrives through an intermediary, not a form

The Medical Research Future Fund funds a portfolio of programs rather than one open-ended pool a startup applies to directly. The 2026 BioMedTech Incubator grant opportunity, for example, funds incubator organisations — not individual companies — to run programs that take Australian SMEs’ early-stage medical research through R&D and toward investment-readiness and commercialisation; a health-tech founder’s path into MRFF money is usually through winning a place in one of those incubator cohorts, not through a direct company application. All MRFF competitive grant opportunities, including future BioMedTech, Clinical Trials Activity, and commercialisation-adjacent rounds, are published on GrantConnect as they open, with the program-specific guidelines setting eligibility, activity scope and reporting obligations round by round.

The pattern to plan around is the SISFS one: an incubator or program committee approves your fit against its milestones and its permitted-activity rules before any money moves, and reporting against those milestones continues after approval. Reading the current round’s guidelines on GrantConnect or business.gov.au — not last round’s — is the first step, because eligibility and funding caps are reset round by round.

State device funds sit alongside the federal offset, with their own turnover and TRL gates

Federal programs are not the only line. States run their own sector-specific funds that a health-tech device company should check on the business.gov.au grants finder alongside the federal search — the NSW Medical Devices Fund is the clearest example: it funds commercialisation of medical devices and technologies from a minimum Technology Readiness Level, gates eligibility on annual turnover and NSW-based project activity, and requires evidence that other funding sources are insufficient before it will co-fund a project. Each round closes and reopens on its own calendar, so the guidelines that matter are whatever round is currently open, not a remembered figure from a prior one.

The throughline across R&DTI, MRFF-adjacent programs and state device funds is the same: none of them pay against a pitch. Each one pays against a file — a registration, a milestone report, or a set of financial statements tied to the project — assessed by the program or its delegate, never by the company describing its own progress.

What application-ready health-tech accounts look like

The SISFS engagement’s deliverable — milestones, a utilisation plan, and multi-year financials that hold up to a committee’s scrutiny — is the same shape a strong R&DTI or MRFF-adjacent application needs, adapted to what an Australian program asks for. In practice that means: R&D expenditure tracked at project level from the start, not reconstructed from the general ledger after the fact; time and cost separated between core R&D activity, supporting activity, and ordinary product work, because the AusIndustry registration and the ATO claim both hinge on that split; contemporaneous records of what was tried and why (design notes, test logs, timesheets against project codes) that a reviewer can trace an expenditure line back to; and a utilisation or milestone budget that a grant committee or incubator can hold you to round by round.

CapEasy’s part in that is the bookkeeping and the file: project-level ledgers, the R&D expenditure schedule reconciled to the books, and the milestone/utilisation numbers built clean enough for your registered tax agent or the program’s own assessors to work from directly. The R&DTI self-assessment, the AusIndustry registration, and everything lodged with the ATO are prepared for your registered BAS or tax agent to review and lodge — a grant committee’s approval decision, like AusIndustry’s activity determination, belongs to the program.