Apolitical: EIC Accelerator Grant for GovTech, and What Came Next

Apolitical started as a news and networking site where civil servants could read how other governments had tackled a problem. It wanted to become something closer to a LinkedIn for the state: a paid platform where public servants learn from each other, and a marketplace where technology companies meet government buyers. In the European Commission's list of companies selected at the 9 October 2019 cut-off of the EIC Accelerator pilot, Apolitical Group Limited of London appears with a grant-only award for the project APOLITICAL, as the project's only beneficiary. The EU contribution was €1,333,178 towards a total cost of €1,904,541.25, according to CORDIS.

Seven years later the company is still trading, says it has more than 500,000 members in 170 countries, and sells online courses and AI tools to governments. Most of the larger money since the grant came not from investors but from philanthropy: $5 million from Google.org in 2024 and $2 million from the Bezos Earth Fund the same year. Two of the things it told the EU it would build, a marketplace for GovTech companies and a semantic policy search engine, have no public trace.

Where Apolitical Stands Now

Companies House lists Apolitical Group Limited as active, with a confirmation statement filed in March 2026 and accounts for 2024 filed on 30 September 2025. The register shows no charges, and The Gazette has no insolvency notice for the company. Its registered office moved on 28 April 2022 from Horse Guards Avenue in Westminster, the address CORDIS still shows, to 20-22 Wenlock Road in London, according to the filing history.

The product today is a learning platform with themed "campuses". The company's website lists a Government AI Campus and a Government Climate Campus, bespoke academies for individual governments, and Futura, an AI system it says pinpoints "where AI will deliver the greatest impact" in a public workforce. On 5 February 2026 it announced two further tools funded by $2 million from Google.org: a Government AI Navigator, a database of government AI case studies, and PolicyNova, an AI research tool for early policy work, both due to launch later in 2026. The announcement was made at the World Governments Summit in Dubai, as MENA Startup Digest reported. Neither tool's launch has been announced at the time of writing.

Governments buy through public procurement channels. Apolitical is a registered supplier on the UK government's G-Cloud 15 framework and is sold in the United States by the public-sector reseller Carahsoft. Revenue is not public: as a small company, Apolitical files its balance sheet but not its profit and loss account.

The Technology: A Social Network and School for Civil Servants

The technology is a web platform rather than a hardware or science breakthrough. The CORDIS objective describes a peer-to-peer platform that went online in June 2017, whose policy content had "reached more than 30 million people" and whose private network was "used by more than 16,000 policymakers in more than 140 countries". The grant was to "upscale the TRL7 platform into a fully featured version" with "a subscription-based community and marketplace serving governments, policymakers and business". The main private-sector market it named was "GovTech SMEs, i.e. those with tech-enabled products selling to government".

The difference from established alternatives is the audience. National civil service academies train their own staff, and general course platforms sell to anyone; Apolitical restricts its network to verified public servants across countries and builds courses with partners such as the University of Oxford, Stanford Online and Google.org, according to its Google.org announcement and Bezos Earth Fund announcement. Its pitch to the EU in 2017 was "TripAdvisor meets LinkedIn for policy and government", in the words of its SME Instrument Phase 1 project.

The membership figures are the company's own and are not audited. They also do not count the same thing over time, as the chart notes.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The EU had funded Apolitical once before. A six-month SME Instrument Phase 1 feasibility study ran from 1 February to 31 July 2017 with an EU contribution of €50,000, according to CORDIS. It set the targets for a later Phase 2 project: "200,000-300,000 civil servant users, 30,000 paid government subscribers, 50 documented cases of new policies being implemented due to Apolitical".

The Phase 2 project came out of the October 2019 round. The grant was signed on 18 March 2020. Under the Withdrawal Agreement, UK participants kept their Horizon 2020 funding for the lifetime of their projects, as the UK government and the Marie Curie Alumni Association explained at the time. The project ran from 1 April 2020 to 30 September 2022 and closed on schedule.

The periodic report published on CORDIS is filed under the second reporting period (1 April 2021 to 30 September 2022), but its text describes "Year 1 of our project" and says that "2020 has been a year of tremendous progress". It reports market research, a rebuilt and relaunched platform with short courses as a new content type, a net promoter score of 95% for the new paid product, "an initial c. 6,000 underlying individuals on Apolitical Plus+" and "a total of 115,000+ users across both the paid and the free platform". It also describes a data science product called Civia, renamed GovQuery, built on web-scraped policy content and the RDFox graph database, with a user interface still being designed. The company had 45 employees at the time, against 22 in the objective. No summary of the second year's work or of the final results is published. The results page lists three deliverables: the relaunched website, a report on user testing of "a lite native mobile presence", and a report on communication activities.

1. Rebuilt, fully featured platformDeliveredRelaunch reported on CORDIS and listed as a deliverable.
2. Subscription product for public servantsDeliveredApolitical Plus+ with about 6,000 individuals in the report; paid courses and academies on the website today.
3. 200,000 to 300,000 civil servant usersDelivered500,000 members claimed in February 2026; the company's own figure.
4. Marketplace for GovTech SMEs and businessNot deliveredNot mentioned in the CORDIS report, and no launch announced by the company or reported by others.
5. GovQuery semantic policy searchNot deliveredInterface still in design in the report; no public launch. PolicyNova, announced in 2026, is not described by the company as its successor.
6. 30,000 paid government subscribersNot deliveredThe 2017 Phase 1 target; the only published paid figure is about 6,000.

What Came Next: Series A, Then Philanthropy

Apolitical raised a £5 million Series A led by Systemiq Capital and Perivoli Innovations, with View Different and Kevin Efrusy, reported by Nordic 9 in March 2022; UKTN put its total funding at £10 million in February 2024. The accounts show the money arriving in 2021: share premium rose from £2,676,109 to £9,086,769, and a £1.5 million convertible loan on the 2020 balance sheet disappeared, according to the filed accounts.

The two campuses were then built largely on grants. The Government Climate Campus began as a pilot in January 2023 with the Bezos Earth Fund as founding funder and Oxford's Smith School as founding expert partner; in September 2024 the fund added $2 million, after the pilot had trained more than 40,000 public servants, with a goal of 12 million by the end of 2026, according to Tech.eu and Startup Rise. The Government AI Campus trained 13,000 public servants in its pilot, funded by Google.org and the Rockefeller Foundation, and in June 2024 Google.org gave $5 million to reach one million government workers within two years, according to Tech.eu and BusinessCloud. Whether the one million and 12 million targets were met has not been announced.

The team grew through the EIC project, from 32 average employees in 2020 to 54 in 2022, then eased to 47 in 2024. The 2025 filings point to new capital: share allotments on 9 May 2025 took issued capital from £1,948 to £2,469.59, and on the same day both founders ceased to be persons with significant control, so neither is any longer recorded as holding more than 25% of the shares, according to the register's control records. Who bought the new shares and for how much has not been announced; no 2025 funding round could be found in public sources.

The Money

The balance sheets show a sharp swing in cash and net assets. Cash fell from £3,944,216 at the end of 2021 to £229,795 a year later, and net assets turned negative: minus £27,775 at the end of 2022 and minus £384,991 at the end of 2023. At the end of 2024 cash stood at £4,048,990 and net assets at £232,823, but creditors due within a year had grown to £4,470,064, of which £4,240,242 were "other creditors", and other reserves had risen to £4,057,970. The accounts do not explain either item. Accumulated losses reached £13,051,327.

Apolitical is not in the EIC Fund portfolio: none of the 16 pages of invested companies lists it, which is consistent with its grant-only award.

Why Europe Should Care

Apolitical is a British company, but its subject is squarely on the EU agenda. The Commission's Apply AI Strategy of 8 October 2025 names the public sector among the sectors where it wants AI adopted and relies on AI literacy, reskilling and an AI Skills Academy to get there, as Lewis Silkin summarised. Apolitical sells exactly that kind of training, keeps an office in Berlin and lists Estonia's Ministry of Justice and Digital Affairs among its partners on its website. Whether public servants in EU member states make up a large share of its 500,000 members is not published.

The Verdict

Apolitical has not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.