What was broken
A tech-enabled mobility startup building rural roadside assistance needed early capital to scale after launch.
What we did
CapEasy built the seed fund application — a utilisation plan, market framing and financial projections — and aligned every part of the proposal to the scheme’s own eligibility and compliance requirements rather than a generic pitch template.
Where it landed
The startup secured approval from a public seed fund. A Seed Fund approval is the committee’s sanction; actual disbursement follows the scheme’s due-diligence and compliance milestones and is not guaranteed.
The R&D Tax Incentive: an offset, not a grant round
Unlike a competitive grant, the R&D Tax Incentive (R&DTI) has no pitch and no committee — it is a self-assessed tax offset you register for, then claim through your company tax return. For companies with aggregated turnover under $20 million, the offset is refundable and equal to your corporate tax rate plus an 18.5 percentage-point premium. At $20 million turnover and above, the offset is non-refundable and tiered by R&D intensity: expenditure up to 2% of total company spend gets the corporate tax rate plus 8.5 points, and the portion above 2% gets the corporate tax rate plus 16.5 points — both scaled back to the plain corporate rate once notional R&D deductions pass $150 million in a year (business.gov.au, "Overview of the R&D Tax Incentive").
Registration with the Department of Industry, Science and Resources — via the R&DTI customer portal at incentives.business.gov.au — is due 10 months after the end of the income year the R&D activities occurred in: for a 30 June year end, that is the following April. An extension of time can be requested, but it is assessed case by case and is not automatic (business.gov.au, "Apply for the R&D Tax Incentive"), so the registered deadline is the one to plan around. The scheme is self-assessed, which means the burden sits with the claimant to have kept, and be able to produce on request, the records showing the activities and expenditure actually happened — not to have a strong story about them after the fact.
Transport is a named priority sector, not a generic "innovation" claim
The Industry Growth Program (IGP) lists Transport as one of its explicit National Reconstruction Fund priority sectors, alongside "Enabling capabilities" — a category that covers AI, robotics and advanced manufacturing and squarely fits fleet telematics, dispatch algorithms and roadside/logistics automation. A mobility tech founder does not have to argue their way into an adjacent category; the sector fit is already written into the program (business.gov.au, "Industry Growth Program").
The process runs in two stages: a free Advisory Service first, matching the business with a specialist adviser who develops recommendations, and only then — on the adviser’s report — an application for matched grant funding: AUD $50,000–$250,000 for early-stage commercialisation work (feasibility studies, proof-of-concept, prototyping) or AUD $100,000–$5,000,000 for commercialisation-and-growth projects, assessed by an independent committee on merit. As of the most recent program status check, the Industry Growth Program is paused to new applications — worth confirming current round status on business.gov.au before building a submission around it, the same way the SISFS application above was built to the scheme’s live rules rather than assumed ones.
What "application-ready" records look like for a mobility/logistics R&D claim
The R&DTI test turns on whether spend was on eligible "core" or "supporting" R&D activities — the technical uncertainty around, say, a new routing algorithm or a novel telematics integration — as distinct from business-as-usual feature development, customer support tooling or ordinary software maintenance. That line has to be drawn activity by activity and cost by cost, not assumed for the whole engineering team.
What makes a claim defensible on inspection is project-level accounting kept as the work happens: engineering time tracked against named R&D projects (not just "engineering" as a single cost line), contractor and cloud-infrastructure spend allocated to the project it supported, and an expenditure ledger that reconciles to the R&D Tax Incentive schedule filed with the company tax return. CapEasy’s part is exactly that groundwork — the project-coded books, the expenditure schedule, the numbers tied to the ledger — prepared for your registered tax agent, who determines eligibility and lodges the claim.
What to take from it
- A grant or offset application is judged against the scheme’s own eligibility test, not the strength of the pitch — build to the test first.
- The R&DTI offset rate depends on your turnover band and, above $20 million, your R&D intensity — know which tier applies before you plan around a rate.
- R&DTI registration is due 10 months from year end, and an extension is discretionary and not automatic; treat the deadline as a compliance date, not a soft target.
- Transport and "enabling capabilities" (AI, robotics, automation) are named IGP priority sectors — a mobility/logistics founder does not need to argue sector fit, but does need to confirm the program is currently accepting applications.
- A defensible R&D claim needs project-coded time and spend kept through the year, not reconstructed from memory when the schedule is due.