Grant management software
for UK foundations
Custodian.
The entire grant lifecycle, for the whole foundation team.
Applications
Submissions scored and assessed for due diligence by AI.
Partnerships
Sourced grantees screened by AI for alignment and due diligence.
Trustee voting
AI brief lets trustees read, comment and vote in one view.
Finance
Payments tracked, bank details verified, balances and budgets reconciled.
Reporting
Reports assessed by AI, schedules tracked and overdue submissions flagged.
Portfolio insight
Impact mapped against themes, deprivation and geographic reach.
AI runs through all stages
AI shows its reasoning as it reads, scores, summarises and checks. Final decisions remain with your team.
Audit-ready by default
Every decision, payment and report leaves a timestamped trail, for best practice governance and regulatory compliance.
Designed with foundations
Designed by a foundation CEO and trustee with 20 years’ experience, built by a leading cyber security engineer, developed with national foundations.
Human experience, superhuman capabilities.
Custodian uses AI models that are guided by decades of industry experience, then tuned by AI engineers so your team can make better-informed grant decisions.
Grant makers are facing application overwhelm.
Need is rising. Most grant management still runs on spreadsheets, inboxes and disconnected systems. Intake is fragmented, due diligence is manual, board papers are built from scratch, and impact is hard to capture.
From application to impact.
Custodian is one intelligent grant management layer across the whole grant lifecycle.
Everyone on the team works in the same place, whether they sit in grants, finance, reporting, compliance or on the board. All data is centralised, so each person sees the foundation's full picture: every workflow, every activity stream and the whole of its operation.
Grant assessment and due diligence
Inbound applications, expressions of interest and sourced partnerships are assessed by AI, with due diligence performed on each.
How assessment works →Proactive grantmaking and sourcing partners
Search for partners or let Custodian suggest organisations that match your giving strategy or funding patterns. A partner you find goes through the same checks and assessment as any application.
More on finding partners →Trustee voting
Trustees read, comment and vote on shortlisted funding proposals in one view, and applicants are told the outcome directly from the system.
Payments, reports and the awards ledger
Payments are scheduled and budgets reconciled, with due and late items highlighted. Reports are assessed by AI against the outcomes you intended. Every award sits in one searchable register, published to 360Giving automatically.
See your giving whole, for the first time.
A live view of your whole portfolio by programme, theme, location, period and deprivation (using the Indices of Multiple Deprivation), with the impact your grantees report shown alongside the financials.
Read more about portfolio insight →
Ask your funding portfolio anything.
Ask Custodian any question about your funding portfolio, patterns and trends, and get an intelligent answer back. It goes beyond the facts of what you have funded, with insight into how you could strengthen your approach and advance your giving priorities.
“Using our portfolio, outcomes and deprivation data, identify our biggest opportunities to strengthen our strategy. For each, recommend what to evolve going forward and the impact it could have. Draw on wider sector practice and the landscape of need where relevant."
Your complete funding picture in one view.
Most foundations come to Custodian mid-flow, with live grants, a form applicants already know and years of history. We're built for that.
Your forms. No migration.
Keep the application form your applicants already know. Custodian connects to Typeform, Formstack, Gravity Forms and any other form service by webhook or API, and reads every submission into one consistent application record.
Your entire funding history, live from day one.
Bring your funding history with you. Custodian supports you through onboarding, free of charge, so your active and completed awards, with their payments, reporting, grant purpose and impact measurement, are live in the system from the day you start.
Built for the standards foundations answer to.
A permanent audit trail records every decision, vote, payment and edit, with who made it and when, and is searchable and exportable.
AI is a starting point, not a decision. It shows its reasoning, and people make every shortlisting, voting and award decision. See how our AI is governed.
Read the full security and data answers in the FAQ.
Residency
Data stored in the UK.
Registered
Registered with the ICO.
Model training
Never used to train AI.
Yours to take with you
On leaving, your data is returned and deleted within 30 days.
Better decisions. Fairer funding. Greater impact.
Grant management software for foundations that want to be better funders, not just faster ones.