It's pretty difficult to get software development to qualify for SR&D. The way it was explained to me by a consultant was to qualify there had to be technological risk of failure (i.e. it is unknown whether or not it is possible to do task X via software).
So your average SAAS startup doesn't face technological risk, even though they face lots of business risks (might not be able to hire good enough developers, might not be able to produce bug free app, etc).
However the first few companies using deep learning to do facial recognition from photos (eg. facebook automatic tagging)... well they would have faced technological risk. It wasn't known at the outset that deep learning would produce sufficient quality matches to be useful.
On the downside... big organizations that can pay big bucks for assistance with writing SR&D applications can qualify for S&RD. Several of the big Canadian banks have recovered considerable amounts. Which is pretty outrageous on the face of things... how much actual SR&D and technological risk is being faced in a banking environment? None that I've ever seen (well... except for one project I was involved in... but that was a trivial "lets try this and see if we can use shared record locks as activity signals for a job scheduler").
In a way scientific/technological risk is a bad measure for software R&D. In general there is very little technological risk, and what risk there is is generally tackled via prototyping and/or early testing. The meat of the development costs comes much later... and there's no gov't tax support for that at all.