TMF AI ICURe:
Advancing frontier AI research towards spin-out

Across the year the programmes delivered strong participation across the full pathway, with 49 places in Engage, 31 in Discover, 9 in Explore and 6 in Exploit. As some teams progressed between stages, these figures reflect participation across the programme rather than unique teams. Researchers took part from across the UK and from a wide range of institutions, including Russell Group, post-92 and other higher education organisations, highlighting both the national reach of the programme and the strength of the UK’s AI research base.

We are building stronger pathways that connect UKRI funding with commercialisation support, enabling AI researchers to explore the real-world potential of their work in priority sectors. Across multiple TMF AI ICURe cohorts delivered over the past year, we have seen researchers progress through the pathway, with six teams having participated in ICURe Exploit and moving closer to spin-out and investment readiness.

– Ewa Nowicka-Ratajczak, ICURe Lead, Innovate UK

Culture Digital: unlocking the value of cultural data

Large archive collections often remain underused because of inconsistent or incomplete metadata, which limits their accessibility and commercial potential. Culture Digital, led by Entrepreneurial Lead Benjamin Kyneswood, Associate Professor of Digital Heritage and Culture at Coventry University, applies a human-moderated AI workflow to enrich collections with high-quality metadata, combining AI efficiency with human oversight to ensure accuracy and trust. By turning archives into structured digital assets, the platform helps organisations open up new opportunities for licensing, reuse and wider dissemination.

The team took Culture Digital through the TMF AI ICURe Explore and Exploit programmes, validating the need through customer discovery with organisations managing large-scale collections and refining the commercial proposition.

Culture.Digital emerged from Coventry University and was supported initially through the DigiSpinWM commercialisation programme before progressing through the TMF AI ICURe Explore and Exploit programmes. Together, these programmes helped shape the commercial pathway, customer discovery and investor engagement needed to position the platform as a scalable solution for helping families, communities and businesses generate value from local collections.

– Benjamin Kyneswood, Coventry University Research Centre for Arts and Creative Cultures

Energentic: smarter decisions for complex energy systems

Large volumes of energy system data are readily available, but turning that data into timely, actionable decisions remains a significant barrier to optimisation and deployment. Energentic, led by Entrepreneurial Lead Dr Zekun Guo, Lecturer at the Data Science, AI and Modelling Centre at the University of Hull, uses agentic AI to enable real-time decision-making, combining system modelling, optimisation and explainable AI to support more efficient and responsive operation.

Dr Guo took Energentic through the Explore and Exploit stages, following earlier participation in ICURe Discover. Structured customer discovery with stakeholders across energy, infrastructure and commercial building sectors surfaced operational barriers including fragmented workflows, limited internal modelling capacity and the need for clearer, more explainable outputs.

“During the Explore stage, the customer discovery process was particularly valuable. Through conversations with stakeholders across the energy, infrastructure and commercial building sectors, it became clear that the challenge was not simply about having more data, but about helping users turn complex system data into faster, more practical decisions,” said Dr Guo.

“It shifted my perspective quite significantly. Rather than focusing first on the technical capabilities of the platform, I became much more focused on the real operational pain points faced by potential users, including fragmented workflows, limited internal modelling capacity and the need for clearer and more explainable outputs,” Dr Guo added.

The Exploit stage translated the concept into an early-stage commercial proposition, engaging investors and partners and developing a clearer pathway towards pilot deployment. Energentic is now seeking early partners to trial the platform in real-world environments.

Responsible AI and the route to market

Artificial intelligence is changing how information is created, analysed and applied, with growing potential to drive breakthroughs across science, industry and public services. Many of those innovations remain within academic environments, with limited understanding of how they can be adopted in practice. The TMF AI ICURe programmes were designed to address this gap, supporting researchers to translate responsible and trustworthy AI innovations into practical applications by building market awareness, validating demand, testing assumptions and identifying barriers to adoption. The programmes focused on areas including explainability, mechanistic interpretability, model robustness and safety in increasingly autonomous systems, and were delivered using the lean startup methodology.

The Technology Missions Fund is designed to strengthen UK capability in priority frontier sectors, including artificial intelligence, and support technologies with the potential to drive economic and societal impact. Programmes like TMF AI ICURe play an important role in helping researchers translate their work into real-world applications and explore pathways to commercialisation

– Trias Gkikopoulos, Head of Foundational Capabilities – AI and Digital, Innovate UK

The pathway spanned four stages: Engage introduced the fundamentals of commercialisation and market opportunity, Discover focused on customer discovery and understanding adoption challenges, Explore supported validation of commercial potential and business model development, and Exploit prepared teams for investment, scale-up and spin-out. One Discover cohort focused on sovereign AI, reflecting the growing importance of national capability in advanced AI systems. Delivered collaboratively by ICURe Delivery Partners across the UK, the TMF AI pathway combined sector focus with the proven ICURe model, showing how it can be applied to priority technology areas identified in the UK Industrial Strategy (IS-6) and aligned with mission-led funding to support emerging sectors.