Public Funding for Elementary B Ltd

A lack of information, digitisation and access to the right financial planning/banking solutions costs UK SMEs £16B/year in lost manual financial management and overpaying banking fees (ACCA,2022; McKinsey,2021). Now more than ever, SMEs are affected by a lack of tools for making effective financial plans (PWC2023) and closing shop at unprecedented rates due to the constant flux of global economic events impacting every aspect of their businesses. 25% are not expected to survive the year, creating economic losses of £500B in turnover and 2.8M jobs (ACCA,2022). For UK manufacturing, responsible for £400.8bn/sales, 51%/UK's-total-exports and 64%/UK R&D spend (MAKE2023), economic uncertainty is even more disproportionately impacting due to dependencies on global supply chains for the sourcing of raw materials fundamental to their productivity. Acting as an early warning system, Elementaryb's affordable, plug & play sherloc platform notifies SME finance directors when a macroeconomic or geopolitical shift poses a risk to their financial plans in order to mitigate risk and reduce financial loss arising out of direct and indirect dependencies to global economic, supply, climate and political events. Sherloc uses artificial intelligence and leverages data standards to help SMEs plan, and monitors global activity impacting their landscape in real-time. When changes are detected, sherloc provides the intelligence, data and expertise needed using natural language processing and a graphical user-friendly interface for SMEs to proactively action, increasing profitability and survival of UK SMEs. Elementaryb are seeking grant funding for an industrial research project to implement sherloc in 20 West Midlands-based SMEs and drive the innovation within an industry vertical (manufacturing) and sub-vertical (£5m-10m/turnover/food & beverage sub-sector) through to TRL9 that can be scaled across wider manufacturing and processing hubs in the UK and Commonwealth due to shared data standards and sensitives. The Midlands was chosen as it accounts for over 25% of England's manufacturing workforce (MEP2021) and has been unable to recover post pandemic due to the difficult macro-economic conditions and dependencies on climate change, supply chains and changing customer demands (LSE2022).