Innovation Vouchers in Ireland: €10,000 of free expertise for software founders

Some funding is a project. The Innovation Voucher is closer to a favour the state does you, and it is genuinely one of the easiest, lowest-friction supports available to an Irish founder. A standard voucher is worth €10,000, the application is light, and it exists for one reason: to connect small companies with expert knowledge they cannot generate on their own. If you have never used one, this is the post to fix that.

What it actually is

An Innovation Voucher, run by Enterprise Ireland, lets any Irish SME buy in expertise from a registered knowledge provider. That means a university, an institute of technology, or another approved research body on the official list. You bring a specific business or technical question, you pair with a provider who knows that area, and the voucher covers their work on it.

A standard voucher is worth €10,000 (it was increased from €5,000 in 2024), and a co-funded voucher provides up to €20,000 when you match part of the cost yourself. Check the official page for the current values and call windows before you plan around them.

It is deliberately simple. There is no requirement to be a High Potential Start-Up, no need for export traction yet, and the application is far lighter than a feasibility grant. For very early founders it is often the first piece of non-dilutive funding worth reaching for, and it sits comfortably alongside the bigger Enterprise Ireland supports you grow into.

What it is, and is not, for

The voucher funds knowledge, not purchases. You cannot use it to buy software, hardware, or general services. You use it to answer a question that genuinely needs outside expertise: a technical feasibility question, a validation or testing method, a research problem at the edge of what your team knows.

That distinction matters when you plan the spend. The strongest uses are well-scoped questions where a knowledge provider's specialist input changes what you do next.

A smart angle for medical software founders

Here is a use that often gets overlooked. If you are building Software as a Medical Device, some of your hardest early unknowns are not in the code, they are in the regulatory and quality approach: how a standard applies to your specific product, how to structure verification and validation, how to evidence a particular risk control. These are exactly the kind of questions a registered knowledge provider with regulatory or biomedical expertise can help you work through.

Used this way, the voucher does double duty. You answer a real question, and you build understanding of your compliance path at the same time, while someone else's budget covers the expert time. Pair that with knowing your classification going in, and the conversation with your provider gets sharper and more productive immediately.

For the full picture of what else is available, our map of grants for medtech and health software startups lays out the Irish and EU options side by side.

Where QualiHQ comes in

A knowledge provider can help you understand your regulatory approach. Turning that understanding into the actual documentation, the quality management system, the risk file, the requirements and traceability, is a separate job, and historically an expensive one.

That is the gap QualiHQ closes. You bring your product and your test evidence; QualiHQ reads your documents and your test runs and generates the QMS and the records the standards expect, at a fraction of what a consultant charges to build them from scratch. So the insight you gain from a voucher engagement does not sit in a report, it becomes a working compliance foundation, without burning your runway to get there.

The voucher is small, simple, and easy to win. Use it to remove a real unknown, and let the compliance groundwork build alongside it rather than waiting for later.

Official source, always check for current call dates and rules: Enterprise Ireland Innovation Vouchers.

Working out your regulatory path while you line up support? Find your likely class in two minutes, free, and walk into any expert conversation already prepared. Then see how QualiHQ builds your QMS.