Technology Developer Accelerator Programme (TDAP)

Funding and support to grow your business

Our Technology Developer Accelerator Programme (TDAP) is here to help accelerate early-stage transport technology concepts to market. Through TDAP, we provide up to £170,000 of combined grant funding, technical support and business mentoring to help start-ups, spinouts and SMEs bring their innovations to life.

Our application process is currently closed. If you’d like to be one of the first to hear about when we’re looking for our next cohort of businesses, please register your interest to be added to our mailing list. 

What is TDAP?

This 18-month phased programme, is designed to accelerate your innovations route to market and includes: 

  • Business strategy guidance and technology development delivered over two phases: Market Focus and Technology Validation 
  • Six focus areas supported and delivered by a series of flexible workstream activities and workshops including:

o Commercialisation strategy and financial planning 

o Intellectual property management 

o Investor readiness 

o New product development 

o Leadership and new venture growth 

o Dissemination, networking and marketing  

o Business and investor mentoring from independent experts 

o Automotive industry networking  

  • Peer-to-peer support via a community of like-minded, ambitious businesses 
  • Up to £170,000 grant funding split across two phases (Any award is subject to Ministerial and His Majesty’s Treasury approval.) 

Who is TDAP for?

TDAP supports ambitious UK-based micro, small and medium-sized companies, including start-ups and university spinouts. We also support more mature SME organisations that can benefit from the programme’s business strategy and development mentoring.  

Applicants must be developing an innovative automotive-related technology, product or service which could support the shift to net-zero automotive. 

How has TDAP supported SMEs?

Over the last seven years, TDAP has: 

  • Supported 100+ companies with over £12.6 million in funding support 
  • Helped to average a 50% increase in headcount and forecast over 1000 new FTE within five years  
  • Accelerated route to market by an average of 19 months  
  • Supported businesses to raise over £250 million in private investment and secured commercial agreements  
  • Advanced technology readiness level to 4/5

Fresh perspectives from business and investment mentors

All successful participants will have a dedicated APC TDAP team member, as a central point of contact, to provide help and support throughout the duration of the programme. You’ll also have access to our network of industry mentors tasked with challenging current thinking, providing a fresh take, and offering real-world expertise on business strategy development and investor relations. 

Showcasing fantastic businesses

Selection for TDAP is a competitive process that sees applicants pass through rigorous assessment, selection and ongoing gateway processes driven by the APC and our hand-picked independent industry experts.

Not only does this ensure that we work with some of the most exciting concepts coming through the early-stage innovation pipeline, it also acts as a signal to the outside world that these companies are high-quality concepts with great teams behind them.

Here’s what some of the companies we’ve supported have to say…

TDAP enabled us to go from purely academic research, to a commercially meaningful and functioning entity.

TDAP gave us access to specialised automotive consultants which helped us define our value proposition, find our target market, our position in the value chain, what our business model was, how to be profitable and to write a business plan to enable us to raise further investment and grants.

Jean De La Verpilliere CEO, Echion Technologies

TDAP has been absolutely fundamental for our company. It’s been the seed funding that has enabled us to develop an awful lot of subsystems that go into our battery modules. Every single battery module we make will be using those subsystems that we’ve developed on TDAP.

It’s really the seed from which our entire company will grow.

Doug Cross Co-founder, Balance Batteries

TDAP gives you the financial support, which is quite a small part of the overall benefit of being on TDAP. It gives you the tools and the resource to be able to execute and see the opportunity there is for a proper profitable business which can grow, develop and expand into the future.

This process lays the foundations to be able to do that.

Rob White Founder, White Motorcycle Concepts

See the projects we’ve funded so far

We’re proud of the portfolio of organisations we have supported through TDAP. We’ve been able to support fantastic early-stage companies, all the way through to some highly-innovative established SMEs.

Want to chat to the team?

                                        If TDAP sounds like the support your business needs, we’d love to talk to you. Use the form below to get in touch with us and a member of the team will get back to you to discuss how we can work together.

To get in touch with a member of the team…

General enquiries

[email protected]

Media enquiries

[email protected]

Career opportunities

[email protected]

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