StartMatch
StartMatch is an Austrian platform that pairs a grant-trained AI agent with human funding experts to find, draft and document applications for Austrian business grants and the Forschungsprämie, the country's retroactive R&D tax credit.
What is StartMatch?
StartMatch is a web platform for Austrian public funding, built and operated from Vienna by StartMatch FlexCo. It exists because applying for a grant in Austria is slow and formal: the money is there, but the paperwork, the eligibility criteria and the cost evidence stop a lot of companies from claiming it. StartMatch answers that with three things at once — an AI agent, a set of grant management tools, and human consultants who step in at the moments where a mistake is expensive.
The flagship use case is the Forschungsprämie, Austria's research premium. It is a tax credit worth 14% of a company's R&D expenditure, paid directly by the tax office, claimable retroactively for up to four years and granted whether or not the company is profitable. StartMatch covers this end to end: the AI identifies eligible projects, extracts and calculates the costs, and drafts descriptions written to the Frascati criteria, while consultants handle review and submission. Alongside it, an AI grant search covers more than 300 continuously updated Austrian programmes, filterable by project type, company stage, region and amount, backed by an editorial guide organised by federal state and by funding body — FFG, aws, WKO, FWF and others, plus EU programmes such as Horizon Europe.
The publisher is careful to distinguish the agent from a general chatbot: it is trained on the actual funding criteria and follows structured workflows per programme rather than open-ended conversation. Around it sit the parts that make a claim survive an audit — automatic detection of amounts from invoices, cost lists, annual accounts and timesheets, optionally anonymised import of R&D staff and their hours, content organised by fiscal year and project, and exportable cost reports.
Collaboration is handled through workspaces, granular access management and real-time editing shared with the grant experts. Access is a browser application behind a login; there is no mobile app, no browser extension and no public API. Scope is deliberately narrow: the service addresses companies with a registered office or permanent establishment in Austria, and the publisher claims more than €20 million secured by its consultants.
What it does
- Search more than 300 Austrian grants, filtered by project, company stage, region and funding amount
- Draft application texts that follow each programme's criteria, with automatic feedback on what reviewers look for
- Identify which projects and which costs qualify for the Forschungsprämie
- Read invoices, cost lists, annual accounts and timesheets to detect and calculate eligible costs
- Produce exportable, audit-proof cost documentation for the tax authority
- Plan roadmaps, budgets and the allocation of R&D staff inside the same tool
- Work on an application in real time with colleagues and StartMatch grant experts
When to use StartMatch / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if StartMatch is the right fit.
When to use StartMatch
- Founders of Austrian startups looking for non-dilutive funding
- Austrian SMEs that invest in R&D and qualify for the Forschungsprämie
- R&D managers who have to document projects, hours and costs in an audit-proof way
- Finance and controlling teams assembling the cost base behind a claim
- Grant consultants and in-house funding departments using the tool-only or white-label option
When not to use StartMatch
- Companies with no registered office or permanent establishment in Austria
- Private individuals and consumers, whom the terms explicitly exclude from the service
- Teams whose work is routine adjustment, bug fixing or standard software use with no technological uncertainty
- Developers looking for an API to embed grant search in their own product
- Buyers who want instant self-service sign-up without a scoping call with a consultant
How to use StartMatch
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Book the free, non-binding 15-minute introductory call from the booking section of the homepage, or use the contact form instead
- Go through the kick-off with a consultant, who identifies eligible projects and walks you through the platform, remotely or on site
- Create an account and sign in to the platform
- Optionally run the AI grant search to shortlist the programmes that fit your project, stage and region
- Upload invoices, timesheets, annual accounts and any other supporting documents so the platform can detect and calculate costs
- Import your R&D staff and their hours, anonymised if you prefer
- Draft the application texts with the Grant AI and act on the automatic feedback it gives against the programme's criteria
- Organise everything by fiscal year and project, and plan the roadmap and budget in the same place
- Have the StartMatch experts review the file before it goes out
- Submit with expert support, and keep that support for what follows, including a negative FFG assessment or a later tax audit
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Deliberately narrow scope: one country, one body of programmes, and an AI trained on the real criteria rather than a generalist model
- Pricing aligned with the outcome — most of the fee is a share of what is actually awarded, and the Forschungsprämie carries no base fee at all
- Human experts intervene precisely where errors are costly: kick-off, review and submission
- The whole chain sits in one tool, from finding a programme to costs, hours, texts and reports
- Explicit, repeated commitment that customer data is never used to train AI models
- Hosting declared in the EU, with data stored in Frankfurt and AI models run in Belgium
- Fully verifiable legal identity: registry number, VAT number, managing director and address all match the Austrian commercial register
Cons
- Only usable by companies with a registered office or permanent establishment in Austria
- No firm price for the tool on its own — the tool-only and white-label tier is quoted individually
- The real cost depends on success and on the amount awarded, so it cannot be known in advance
- No self-service sign-up: the route in goes through a scoping call
- No public API, no mobile app and no browser extension
- Contract documents are iubenda templates served in German only, even from the English pages, and no Data Processing Agreement is published
- The ISO 27001 and SOC 2 badges on the security page belong to the data centres, not to StartMatch itself
Pricing & Plans
There is no permanent free plan. Pricing is success-based. For most grants, the Done With You tier charges 5% of the amount awarded plus a base fee of €999, and the Done 4 You tier charges 10% plus a base fee stated as €2,499 in the German version of the site and €2,500 in the English one. For the Forschungsprämie no base fee applies at all: the success fee is 1-5% of the credit for Done With You and 10% for Done For You. A tool-only or white-label licence is quoted individually. Because the actual billing unit is a base fee per application combined with a percentage of the amount awarded, no entry price could be expressed in the platform's fixed list of billing units, and the price fields were therefore left empty together.
- Done With You — 5% of the amount awarded on success plus a €999 base fee for most grants
- consulting for content development
- review and submission
- and access to all platform features
- Done 4 You (Done For You) — 10% of the amount awarded on success plus a base fee of €2
- 499 (German site) or €2
- 500 (English site) for most grants
- the grant experts handle every step
- aimed at companies with no funding experience or no time
- Tool-only or Whitelabel — individually quoted
- aimed at funding departments
- consultants and large enterprises
- with access to all features
- custom adjustments including white-label
- and granular access management across multiple projects
- Done With You costs 1-5% of the credit depending on the actual project size
- Done For You costs 10% of the credit
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how StartMatch handles your data.
GDPR overview
GDPR compliance is claimed explicitly on the homepage, on the security page and in the FAQ. The privacy policy is an iubenda document last updated on 31 August 2026 and published in German and English. It names the controller together with its commercial register number, VAT number and address, sets out a legal basis for each purpose, and lists the data subject rights: withdrawal of consent, objection, access, rectification, restriction, erasure, portability and complaint. Subprocessors are named one by one with their place of processing, and hosting is declared inside the European Union, with a single United States processor used for infrastructure monitoring. Because the publisher is established in Austria, no Article 27 representative is designated or needed. No Data Processing Agreement is published or offered, and no retention period is stated in figures.
Who owns the data?
The terms reserve all rights in the service and its content to StartMatch FlexCo or its licensors, covering copyright, trade marks, patents and design rights. Users receive only the rights they need to use the service properly, and nothing beyond that. Material that users upload themselves — invoices, timesheets, annual accounts, project descriptions — stays their own responsibility, and the publisher states plainly that it neither filters nor moderates it. For personal data the named controller is StartMatch FlexCo, Rudolf-von-Alt Platz 3/14, 1030 Vienna, reachable at contact@startmatch.ai. These clauses come from an iubenda-generated standard document that is served in German only, so their wording is not specific to this product.
Reuse rights
Users are not granted any general right to reuse the platform's own content: their licence stops at what proper use of the service requires. What they put in is a different matter. The cost reports the platform builds are explicitly meant to be exported and filed with the tax authority, and StartMatch undertakes that the underlying data stays complete and usable on the platform years later — which is consistent with a tax credit that can be claimed up to four years back. On model training the commitment is unconditional and repeated across the site: customer data is not used to train AI models, neither by StartMatch nor by its service providers.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
The publisher declares hosting in Europe and states that data is stored in Frankfurt while AI processing takes place in Belgium. The privacy policy names each provider with its place of processing. Vercel hosts the application and runs its logic, with data residency in Frankfurt, Germany; the company itself is Vercel Inc., United States, listed under the Data Privacy Framework. Supabase hosts the application, handles logins and stores data, also with residency in Frankfurt; the company is Supabase Inc., United States. Google Cloud runs the AI models and stores data in Saint-Ghislain, Belgium, through Google Cloud EMEA Ltd, Ireland, also listed under the Data Privacy Framework. Other named subprocessors are PostHog Inc. for analytics and session replay in Germany, Google Workspace and Google OAuth through Google Ireland Limited, Brevo (SendinBlue SAS) in France, and Sentry (Functional Software, Inc.) in the United States for infrastructure monitoring. The service is governed by Austrian law, with jurisdiction at the publisher's registered seat in Vienna.
Where StartMatch works
Country-level availability.
Available in
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting StartMatch.
- Application texts are AI-generated but commit the company in front of a public funding body and a tax authority — human review before submission is not optional
- Outsourcing the understanding of eligibility criteria can erode the in-house ability to build a grant file without the tool
- The platform processes sensitive HR data such as salaries and timesheets, and the anonymised import of staff data is offered as an option rather than imposed
- No Data Processing Agreement is published, even though the customer remains controller for that HR data
- The ISO 27001 and SOC 2 certifications shown on the security page belong to the data centres, not to StartMatch, and should not be read as a certification of the publisher
- Being paid a percentage of the amount awarded creates an incentive to maximise the declared cost base, while responsibility for what is declared stays with the company
- Contract documents are served in German only, so an English-speaking customer contracts on a text they may not read in their own language
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Very low on the technical side. There is nothing to install: the platform is a browser application reached after signing in, with optional Google sign-in and two-factor authentication available. No API, connector or extension has to be wired up. The route in is organisational rather than technical — a 15-minute scoping call, then a kick-off, remote or on site, where a consultant demonstrates the platform. The real effort falls on gathering documents such as invoices, timesheets and annual accounts. One customer quoted on the site describes a successful submission achieved with just a few hours of work.
Deployment
Supported languages
Behind StartMatch
Social
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Frequently asked questions
Who is behind StartMatch?
What is the Forschungsprämie and who can claim it?
What does StartMatch cost?
Is there a free plan or a free trial?
Is my data used to train AI models?
Where is the data hosted?
Which languages does the platform support?
Is there an API or a mobile app?
How is the Grant AI different from a general chatbot?
Do I still get human support?
Should you pick StartMatch?
StartMatch is a narrow tool, and that is its strength. Rather than offering a general writing assistant, it takes one national funding system, trains an agent on its actual criteria, and wraps the result in the unglamorous machinery a grant file really needs: cost extraction from invoices and timesheets, hours tracking, reports built to survive a tax audit, and shared workspaces. The Forschungsprämie, Austria's 14% R&D tax credit, is where that combination is most complete.
The commercial design deserves attention. Most of what a customer pays is a share of money actually received, and for the research premium there is no base fee at all — the buyer's downside is genuinely limited. The publisher is also unusually easy to verify: registry number, VAT number, managing director and registered address all match the Austrian commercial register, the company's stated business purpose matches the product, and the security claims are stated soberly.
The reservations are real but mostly about maturity and transparency rather than substance. The legal entity was only registered in March 2025 and the internal team is small. There is no firm price for the software on its own, no Data Processing Agreement despite the platform handling salary and timesheet data, and the contract documents are generic iubenda templates served in German even to English-speaking readers. The ISO 27001 and SOC 2 badges on the security page belong to the data centres, not to StartMatch — the site says so itself, which is to its credit, but a hurried reader could take them the wrong way.
For an Austrian company investing in R&D, this is a well-targeted way to stop leaving public money on the table. Outside Austria it simply has no object.
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