Nicole Bonamici is the co-founder of Timbi, a regtech SaaS platform that automates EU funding compliance for universities, NGOs, research institutions and SMEs.
“We’re solving a €3.2 billion annual problem,” Bonamici says. “This is the amount that organisations collectively spend on consultancy and internal resources navigating the bureaucratic maze of EU funding applications.”
The cost of submitting a research proposal can run into thousands of euro and can take two to four months to prepare because each fund has different requirements. Despite the heavy investment in time and money, success rates remain as low as 16 per cent.
“Most rejections are due to compliance and eligibility errors rather than scientific merit,” says Bonamici, adding that Timbi’s platform combines “symbolic reasoning, graph databases and neural networks to automate opportunity discovery, eligibility checking, budget validation and compliance reporting”.
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The company’s competitors include EU funding aggregators, AI grant tools, EU grants analytics platforms and generic software.
“None provides what Timbi offers – ethical AI automation with deep EU regulatory intelligence,” says Bonamici. “They focus on either call discovery, basic analytics or generic proposal writing, but lack the symbolic-neural AI architecture that understands regulatory semantics.”
The idea for Timbi came to Bonamici while working at NovaUCD, the university’s innovation and start-ups hub. As a commercialisation support executive, part of her job involved helping deep-tech start-ups access investment via private and EU funding.
“I watched brilliant researchers struggling to look for funding and spin-outs that were working on groundbreaking technology but spending a lot of time navigating EU funding instead of focusing on their innovations,” she says.
“I saw this pattern repeatedly, with bureaucracy actively blocking Europe’s best innovators. This wasn’t a workflow problem; it was a regulatory intelligence gap that needed AI to solve it.”
Originally from Italy, Bonamici has an MSc in innovation and technology management. She first developed a soft spot for Ireland during a year-long stay here learning English as a teenager.
She won a scholarship to study technology entrepreneurship at Stanford University and loves the challenge of bringing new ideas to fruition.
This spurred an interest in entrepreneurship and involvement with a Silicon Valley start-up at the very beginning of her career, before she returned to Italy to set up the TEDx events series in Perugia at the age of 22.
Her corporate career included roles with IBM in Italy as a digital strategy consultant and with Cisco in Amsterdam as an account manager.
In 2022, she cofounded a company that had developed an educational video game. Based in Madrid, it did well initially, but when funding became an issue during Covid, the business folded.
This is not something Bonamici would have chosen to go through but, rather than cause her to abandon the entrepreneurial path, she says the experience sharpened her resilience and execution skills.
Timbi is currently in beta testing and will come to market over the next few months with its first service module, which helps organisations identify potential EU funding opportunities and check their eligibility.
Module two will consist of automated compliance recommendations and proposal feedback, and module three will focus on automation and Gantt chart generation – a horizontal bar chart that visually maps project timelines.
Timbi’s target customers are organisations submitting multiple funding applications each year, such as university research and technology transfer offices, third-level spin-outs and research-driven SMEs across Europe and beyond.
Timbi is a bootstrapped start-up that got up and running with a combination of founder time, about €30,000 in cash and small amounts of customer revenue from early adopters such as Dogpatch Labs. This contributed towards initial prototype development as well as the necessary cloud infrastructure set-up and regulatory database construction.
“We’re currently looking for angel investors and are preparing an application for €100,000 in pre-seed funding to accelerate the technology development and to hire researchers and engineers in Ireland,” says Bonamici, who participated in the AI-centric accelerator run at the PorterShed innovation hub in Galway earlier this year.
“We have also submitted a number of proposals for EU funding. If even one succeeds, this would provide a meaningful amount of funding to support our business growth and further integration with angel investors to reach a funding target of €500,000,” Bonamici says.
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The hardest part of starting Timbi, she says, has been managing the technical complexity while building customer trust in AI.
“Institutional buyers are rightfully cautious about AI influencing funding applications as it affects careers, research programmes and institutional reputation. We’ve had to invest heavily in an ethics-first design to overcome this scepticism.”
The six-month sales cycles for universities have also been a challenge, and, as an Italian living in Ireland, Bonamici has had to “build everything from scratch as I’ve no local network, no family financial support, no safety net”.
“Every connection came from networking,” she says. “Being a foreigner also means navigating Irish business culture, understanding local procurement processes and proving credibility without the built-in trust that comes from being a known local entity.
“But, having lived in seven different countries, I can say with absolute certainty that nothing in Europe compares to the Irish start-up ecosystem,” she adds.
“The early-stage support is invaluable, the co-operation among different stakeholders is excellent, and the State backing here is unmatched. Everyone wants you to succeed.
“That said, there are two areas that need improvement. Firstly, stronger regional start-up clusters outside Dublin. Secondly, better bridges to investors in Europe, the US and Asia through Enterprise Ireland partnerships with international accelerators would help Irish start-ups scale globally faster.”
