Tinkr Receives £15K+ of Support Through CreaTech Frontiers and Digital Catapult
- omarikmccarthy
- May 7
- 2 min read
Tinkr has been selected as one of eight companies joining the CreaTech Frontiers Growth Lab, a 10-week accelerator led by Digital Catapult supporting creative technology companies across the West Midlands.
The programme is part of CreaTech Frontiers - a £7.2 million initiative funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), focused on building the West Midlands creative technology ecosystem through innovation, R&D, business growth and talent development.
Over the next 10 weeks, the Growth Lab will provide tailored support around business growth, commercialisation, product strategy, storytelling, responsible innovation and mentorship.
Why This Matters For Tinkr
For many parents of young children, bedtime is one of the most stressful parts of the day. Resistance, overstimulation, emotional escalation and difficulty settling can turn what should be a calming routine into a nightly battle.
Tinkr is building an adaptive bedtime storytelling product designed to help reduce bedtime effort through personalised calming stories that respond to a child’s emotional state and bedtime needs over time.
The timing of this programme is especially important because it comes immediately after Tinkr’s first live pilot cohort.
That pilot validated several important things early:
parents were willing to pay for the experience
families continued returning night after night
the daily bedtime-to-morning feedback loop worked
parents engaged consistently even when the product was still imperfect
At the same time, the pilot also exposed the biggest challenge ahead: the Story Engine itself.
The current system can personalise names, tones and story selection, but the next phase is building a much deeper adaptive engine — one that can better understand a child’s bedtime problem, choose the right calming strategy, and learn from what actually improves bedtime over time.
What Happens Next
As part of the programme, Tinkr completed a Business Health Scan to identify the company’s key growth challenges and support needs.
Over the next phase, the focus will be on refining story engine, improving onboarding and bedtime diagnosis systems, and preparing a stronger cohort 2 pilot built around deeper personalisation and better bedtime outcomes.
Alongside the accelerator itself, Tinkr will also continue running parent interviews and analysing behavioural bedtime data from the first cohort in order to better understand what genuinely helps families settle into sleep.
You can learn more about the programme here:
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