Inside a winning bid: GreenTech Industries joins the UK Government’s Mobilise 2026

By Jo van Vuuren — Fractional CMO

Some news I’m proud of: GreenTech Industries (where I’m fractional Marketing Director) has secured a place on Mobilise 2026, the UK Government’s early-stage accelerator for automotive and mobility innovators, delivered with the Advanced Propulsion Centre UK, Zenzic and Innovate UK. I was part of the team that built the application, so this piece is two things at once: the announcement, and an honest look at what a winning bid actually had to prove.

What GTI won, and why it matters

GTI runs the UK’s first industrial-scale operation for precision EV battery disassembly, at its site in Southam (taking around three tonnes of end-of-first-life battery packs apart every week, by hand, and recovering the components, cells, data and usable life that shredding destroys). The market pressure behind that is stark: by 2040 the UK expects around 235,000 tonnes of EV batteries a year reaching end of life (SMMT), and today most packs are shredded for scrap or shipped overseas.

The Mobilise project (ADAM, Automated Battery Disassembly & Asset Management, with GTI as sole participant) automates that line. Every pack assessed the moment it arrives, a real-time digital twin configuring the process to each battery, robotics and machine vision doing the disassembly: one pack every ten minutes, roughly eight times the manual rate. And the faster line is only half the output. The other half is a “carbon-copy” factory blueprint: a specification any future UK site can be built to.

What the bid actually had to prove

Accelerator and grant applications are won and lost on the same ground as every competitive bid I’ve worked on: not whether the work is good, but whether the case is evidenced, specific and aimed at what the assessor is actually funding. This one rested on three things:

• Proof, not promise. GTI isn’t proposing a concept; it operates commercially today, with nine years of process refinement behind it and an independently validated method. The application led with what already runs, then asked for backing on the genuinely early-stage step: the automation.
• The funder’s question, answered precisely. Mobilise exists to de-risk early-stage innovation. So the bid was explicit about what the programme’s support would validate (the digital twin, the automation risk, the replication blueprint) rather than presenting a general wish list.
• A sovereign story with receipts. A fully owned, 61-entry IP portfolio built from every battery processed since 2017, and a direct line to the UK Critical Minerals Strategy target of meeting 20% of critical mineral needs through recycling by 2035. National priorities argued with the company’s own evidence, not borrowed rhetoric.

The lesson for anyone writing a funding application

It’s the same pattern I described in what a bid writer actually does: the winning submission is rarely the most ambitious one; it’s the one that reads the criteria the way the assessor will, and answers every scored question with evidence the business already owns. The narrative work is real work: taking nine years of hands-on knowledge and organising it into a case a panel can score quickly and believe completely. That is what earned the place.

What happens next

Over the programme, GTI validates the digital twin, de-risks the automation and defines the blueprint, with mentoring, investment-readiness support and IP protection alongside. The full announcement is on gti.systems. And if you have genuinely fundable work of your own (a tender, a grant round, an award) that’s exactly the kind of case I build: bid writing at JVV Consulting. Grant funding for Mobilise is provided by the UK Government.