âWith almost a million dollars on the line, they cannot screw it up,â Philippe Gratton said of the clients using his companyâs platform to apply for research and development tax credits.
Philippe Gratton,
âWith all this raw data, we quickly realized we could do much more than just track time.”
Chrono Innovation
Applying for those credits requires a deep analysis of business projects, accurate tracking of eligible time spent, and technical documentation, a process that typically takes teams two to three months to complete.
With the Chrono Platform, it takes about 15 minutes for a company to receive up to 80 percent of the technical documentation it needs to apply for Scientific Research and Experimental Development (SR&ED) credits.
Created in 1948 and administered by the Canada Revenue Agency, SR&ED provides billions in tax incentives annually to Canadian businesses to engage in research activities. But accessing those incentives is notoriously complex and often requires outside support.
Philippe shared the example of a client whose SR&ED claim was denied after an audit because they couldnât provide sufficient documentation and evidence to support it. Like many companies, the credit had been built into their budget, so when they didnât get it, it hurt.
It also means that the value isnât just time savings, but accuracy and stronger evidence if audited.
Philippe, co-founder and chief product officer of Chrono Innovation, said the reimagined platform was born from his own experience filing for SR&ED, and from watching clients run into the same pain points.
Every year-end, finance teams scramble to find out how much salary was paid towards research and development. This requires knowing how much time each employee spent on eligible activities, then using salary information to run calculations.
âI’ve seen CTOs disappear for weeks, work from home, take no calls, and just try to figure it all out,â said Philippe. âLooking for time related to R&D at the end of the year is almost impossible to track. You need to build all your technical documentation by gathering time sheets, running interviews, sometimes with people who have left the company, then combining all that information and trying to understand what happened.â
It was a problem Philippe would soon face himself.
Founded in 2019, the Montréal-based company started as a consultancy, building SaaS applications for small and medium-sized businesses. As Chrono grew to 30 employees, the team felt firsthand the pain of not having visibility into where time was going.
In 2021, Chrono built a time-tracking platform for software teams that connects directly to existing tools like Jira, GitHub, Asana, and Slack, and automatically detects how time is allocated each day. But Philippe always believed the engineering data they were collecting could unlock more than time tracking alone.
âWith all this raw data, we quickly realized we could do much more than just track time,â said Philippe. âWe knew we could help companies prepare SR&ED tax credits way faster, track project budgets, predict hiring needs, and more. So we started shifting our thinking.â
Today, the Chrono Platform uses an agentic AI assistant called Lucius to automate documentation and support SR&ED claim preparation. The system pulls data directly from a companyâs engineering stack, extracts what work has been completed, and clusters that information to generate a draft report.
Lucius will not generate a report that is ready for submission. Instead, it will draft a report based on the information it extracts and provide placeholders in spots where it has questions. You can then engage in a conversation with Lucius where you can provide more context, similar to a conversation you might have with an SR&ED consultant.
Philippe said his team worked closely with SR&ED consultants to build the new platform.
âWe have zero intention of replacing SR&ED consultants. Our goal is to equip their clients, get them to a more meaningful conversation faster, and ultimately help everyone get paid sooner,â he said.
Helping engineering teams file SR&ED submissions more efficiently is just the beginning. Philippe wants to keep adding skills to Lucius, ultimately having the Chrono Platform become the operating system for engineering teams, supporting everything from compliance and funding to hiring, capacity planning, and long-term scaling.
âAs an engineering leader, you could have one platform to support your core pillars,â said Philippe. âFinding talent at the right time, visibility and predictability in your operations, forecasting versus actuals. Thatâs whatâs next.â
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Learn more about Chronoâs reimagined SR&ED platform and how itâs democratizing R&D funding through the power of AI.