Lauren Valliere Co-Founder & Managing Partner Growise.ai
For many Canadian technology companies, SR&ED can represent a meaningful source of non-dilutive funding. Claiming those credits, however, has traditionally come with a problem of its own: documenting months of technical work after the fact. GrowWise is building an AI-powered approach designed to change that process.
The company works with Canadian innovators to capture research and development activity throughout the year, rather than asking technical teams to reconstruct months of experiments, failures and discoveries when it is time to file a claim.
“Traditionally, founders and technical teams spend an entire year building and experimenting, and then months later are asked to reconstruct what happened,” said Co-Founder & Managing Partner Lauren Valliere. “We built GrowWise around a different idea: what if SR&ED took 10 minutes a month instead of 30+ hours at year-end?”
GrowWise says its technology is designed to reduce the administrative work involved in preparing a claim, allowing technical teams to spend more time building their products.
Turning SR&ED into an ongoing process
GrowWise says it has secured millions of dollars in SR&ED tax credits for Canadian companies, with a 98% success rate. Its customers span industries across Canada, with a particularly strong focus on technology and software companies. The company’s approach is based on a simple shift in timing. Rather than waiting until the end of a company’s fiscal year, GrowWise captures information as technical work happens.
Clients spend roughly 10 minutes a month helping document what is happening, while GrowWise’s technology and consulting team uses that information to prepare the claim. “SR&ED traditionally becomes a major project once a year. We’re trying to make it something that happens quietly in the background,” Valliere said.
After more than two years of refining the process with clients, the company says it is now focused on expanding to more Canadian businesses.
Where AI fits into the SR&ED process
GrowWise is using AI in two key areas. The first is documentation. Its AI agent conducts short interviews with technical teams throughout the year, asking about what they are trying to solve, what they tested, what worked, what failed and what they learned.
The idea is to capture the context while the work is still fresh, instead of asking engineers and developers to remember details months later. The second application is analyzing information that already exists inside a company.
For a typical software or technology startup, evidence of technical experimentation may be spread across code repositories, project management platforms, technical documents, emails, meeting notes and test results. Historically, much of the burden of collecting that information has fallen on the technical team or an external consultant. GrowWise is using AI to help connect those pieces.
“The first is capturing the story while it’s happening,” Valliere said. “The second is information digestion and analysis, which is something AI is incredibly good at.”
The company says the goal is not to use AI to generate a better SR&ED narrative, but to identify and organize evidence of work that actually happened.
“AI shouldn’t be used to invent a better SR&ED story. It should reduce the work required to uncover, document and substantiate the story that actually happened,” Valliere said.
“The future of SR&ED isn’t using AI to write a claim faster. It’s using AI to capture the eligible work as it happens, find the evidence that is buried across various documents, and take the entire administrative burden off the technical team.”
— Lauren Valliere
The opportunity for early-stage companies
For founders, SR&ED is often something that enters the conversation after a company has already spent significant amounts of money on technical development. GrowWise argues that companies should start looking into the program as soon as they begin incurring meaningful expenses related to technical work. That could include hiring developers or engineers, working with technical contractors, purchasing materials for experimentation or building out a technical team.
Eligibility is driven by the technical work being performed and eligible expenditures, rather than simply whether a company is profitable or generating revenue. For startups, that makes early documentation particularly important. Companies that wait until year-end can find themselves trying to reconstruct technical decisions, experiments and results long after the work happened.
“Even if your first claim is still months away, understanding SR&ED early means you can document things properly from the beginning rather than trying to recreate everything at year-end,” Valliere said.
Common misconception: SR&ED isn’t just for traditional R&D labs
One of the misconceptions GrowWise is trying to address is that SR&ED is primarily for scientists or companies with formal research departments. Software, AI, FinTech, manufacturing and other technology companies can also perform work that potentially qualifies. “Some of the strongest SR&ED work happens inside software, AI, FinTech, manufacturing and other technology companies,” Valliere said.
She points to technical teams working on problems where there is no clear solution, requiring experimentation, testing, failure and learning. Another common mistake, she said, is waiting until the end of the year to start thinking about documentation. “Documenting throughout the year can be the difference between a $50k claim and a $120k claim,” Valliere said.
GrowWise’s model therefore focuses not only on preparing a claim, but on creating a documentation process that can fit into existing startup workflows. Rather than asking companies to adopt an entirely new system, the company says it can work with records teams are already creating, including Jira tickets, test results and technical meeting notes, supplemented by its monthly AI interviews.
SR&ED changes could expand the opportunity
GrowWise also sees changes to Canada’s SR&ED program in 2026 as particularly significant for companies with substantial capital requirements. The company says the expansion of SR&ED eligibility to certain capital expenses could be especially relevant to hardware, manufacturing and biotech businesses that invest heavily in equipment, tools and other assets.
Valliere says GrowWise recently helped a hardware and software company increase its SR&ED claim by $240,000 to account for capital costs under the updated rules. For startups operating with limited access to capital, additional non-dilutive funding can have an outsized impact. Instead of giving up equity, companies can potentially recover part of the cost of qualifying innovation activity. The broader opportunity, according to Valliere, is making the SR&ED process better suited to the pace at which modern startups operate.
“Canadian companies are innovating faster than ever, but the SR&ED process hasn’t kept up. We’re bringing SR&ED into the way modern startups actually work: continuously, with less administration and far less time from the technical team.”
— Lauren Valliere
Building toward a larger Canadian market
GrowWise has spent more than two years developing and refining its technology alongside clients. The next phase is focused on expanding its reach among Canadian companies. The company is continuing to invest in technology designed to help businesses identify potentially eligible work, track it throughout the year, prepare claims and avoid leaving eligible work or expenditures behind.
GrowWise is also preparing to launch a free SR&ED assessment for startups. The assessment is intended to help companies determine whether they meet the technical and financial requirements for SR&ED and, if eligible, estimate how much they could potentially receive.
For early-stage founders who are unsure whether they qualify, the assessment is designed to provide an answer before they commit significant time to the process.
“We want to give them a clear answer without requiring a sales call just to find out,” Valliere said.
For GrowWise, the larger opportunity goes beyond automating paperwork. The company is betting that AI can change the timing and mechanics of how Canadian startups document innovation in the first place.
If the model gains broader adoption, SR&ED could become less of an annual administrative project and more of an ongoing process running quietly alongside the work startups are already doing.
