Our Story

Richard Edwards has now co-founded or founded three distinctly different R&D companies. Here’s how each one led to the next.

Co-founded in 2008.

As Operations Director, Richard was responsible for training a rapidly growing team of advisors to prepare R&D claims. In doing so, he noticed a few issues with preparing claims manually. Consultants varied in how well they understood the R&D scheme, and producing reports was an error-prone, repetitive task. The process was crying out to be digitised, but the company was reluctant to move away from its manual processes.

Co-founded in 2018.

Richard moved on to co-found WhisperClaims. This award-winning software platform makes it much easier to gather the necessary information from clients and generates R&D reports directly from the client’s data.

However, in speaking with customers, Richard discovered that many advisors still struggled with tasks that the software couldn’t do. Interpreting the subjective eligibility criteria, speaking to clients about R&D, and defending compliance checks were outside the scope of the system. He realised that advisors needed training and support with all the highly skilled tasks that couldn’t be done by software.

Founded in 2021.

This realisation led to Richard kicking off The R&D Community in early 2021. This gave him a way to bring together all his experience – a degree in Software Engineering, six years in the Royal Navy’s Training Management branch, nine years running an R&D consultancy, and the 3 years getting WhisperClaims off the ground – to create a comprehensive training & support solution for R&D advisors looking to improve or expand their services.