Business grants are an important tool for steering and supporting the economy. However, the search for suitable business grants can be a challenge for companies and businesses in Austria, due to the large number of available business grants from a multitude of different providers. While there are dedicated search engines, companies and businesses often are simply not aware of the existence of grants on a specific topic, and hence cannot use these engines in a targeted search.

The application Grants4Companies aims to provide a better visibility for business grants by suggesting grants in the context of the Unternehmensserviceportal (USP), supplementing existing dedicated search engines. This is achieved by listing relevant business grants for the company or business logged into the USP. The relevance of a grant for the particular business is evaluated using methods of symbolic AI based on the data on that business available from the registers of the public administration. The data used to evaluate the grants for a particular business is retrieved only after an explicit consent, and is visible only for this specific business. The employed methods of symbolic AI yield a higher transparency and explainability, since the ranking of the business grants is achieved by rule-based and hence explicitly justifiable decisions. The underlying machine-interpretable description of the business grants can be used in the future for formal and automated analyses of the considered grants, helping, e.g., to discover gaps in funding or multiple funding in the form of overlapping business grants.

This presentation describes the current implementation of Grants4Companies along with extensions, including a Proof of Concept for using logic- and logic-programming-based methods in the analysis of dependencies between the eligibility criteria.