Funding & opportunities intelligence · 2026 – present
Bearings
An independent engine that reads roughly 560 funders, investors and tender portals every day, and works out who each opportunity is actually for.
Bearings is an independent funding and opportunities intelligence engine for Liverpool City Region businesses and organisations. It monitors around 560 registered sources and holds well over a thousand live opportunities across grants, investment, loans, tenders, challenges, accelerators, advice, training, facilities, awards and networks. Coverage runs across Halton, Knowsley, Liverpool, Sefton, St Helens and Wirral, plus the national and international schemes those places can reach.
The engine is deliberately boring where it should be and clever only where it has to be. Sources are checked on a daily-to-monthly cadence with failures reported in the open. Page hashing detects change, so nothing is reprocessed without reason. Parsing is deterministic, with AI called in only for pages that have changed and cannot be read any other way. AI does the eligibility reading behind the who it is for line under every opportunity, and sector routing runs on a mix of model judgement and rules you can inspect. What counts as open is defined strictly: a deadline still in the future, or a rolling application.
It is free, needs no sign-up and sets no cookies, usage is counted anonymously and never linked to a person, and it is not affiliated with or endorsed by any funder or programme it lists. There is a searchable finder, weekly digests or instant alerts, a public system-health dashboard and an open JSON feed. It is in public beta, and coverage is still widening.
Related: AI consultancy, prototyping and training in Liverpool and Manchester.
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