Innovation funding opportunities
Looking for funding and support to develop your idea? At Innovate UK Business Connect, we connect businesses, researchers and innovators with the right opportunities they need to grow.
Explore opportunities for funding and expert guidance, to help turn your innovation into a commercial success.
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BridgeAI Deployment Catalyst: AI for Assurance and Compliance
Opens: 21/10/2026
Closes: 08/12/2026
UK registered SMEs can apply for a share of up to £5 million to deploy Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning solutions that monitor, test, verify or evidence compliance with requirements, standards or controls.
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BridgeAI Deployment Catalyst: AI for Decision Critical Systems
Opens: 21/10/2026
Closes: 08/12/2026
UK registered SMEs can apply for a share of up to £5 million to deploy Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning solutions that support consequential judgements, recommendations or decisions.
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BridgeAI Deployment Catalyst: AI for Operational Systems
Opens: 21/10/2026
Closes: 08/12/2026
UK registered SMEs can apply for a share of up to £5 million to deploy Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning solutions that perform, control or coordinate operational activity.
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iX Challenge: Accelerating Digital Engineering Through MBSE Simulation
Opens: 09/10/2026
Closes: 06/11/2026
The iX programme is supporting openSPDM to find innovators who can provide a software engineering capability to industrialise and further develop the openSPDM solution for interfacing to Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) solutions, extracting the system architecture definition (system element structure), define key parameters and values as Innovator Items, rolling up the executable models attached to the system structure, launching a 1D simulation code and recovering the results to openSPDM.
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Full ADOPT Grant: Round 10
Opens: 08/10/2026
Closes: 02/12/2026
Farming, growing or forestry businesses based in England can apply for a share of up to £5 million for on-farm trial and demonstration projects, to improve adoption of new ideas or solutions in the agricultural sector.
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iX Challenge: Repeatable Adversarial Evaluation of Physical Tamper Protection for Defence Electronics
Opens: 09/10/2026
Closes: 06/11/2026
The iX programme is supporting Ethicronics to find innovators who can develop a reusable test capability that applies controlled physical and cyber-physical interference to protected electronic assets, captures reliable ground truth and enables repeatable, quantitative assessment of tamper resilience during transit and storage.
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iX Challenge: Next-Generation Electronics for UK Bathymetric Sonar
Opens: 07/10/2026
Closes: 06/11/2026
The Innovation Exchange programme is supporting a bathymetric sonar manufacturer, to identify innovators capable of developing a modern replacement for a critical electronics assembly used within its GeoSwath interferometric bathymetric sonar systems. The challenge is to create a next-generation acquisition and signal-processing platform using currently available and supportable technology, while maintaining or improving the performance of the existing sonar system.
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iX Challenge: Reducing blood-cell loss and measurement variability in field-deployable microfluidic diagnostic cartridges
Opens: 05/10/2026
Closes: 06/11/2026
Beyond Blood Diagnostics seeks innovative solutions to reduce particle loss during flow stage process within a micro channel.
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iX Challenge: Secure, Cost-Effective Use of Cloud-Based AI Tools in the Defence Supply Chain
Opens: 05/10/2026
Closes: 06/11/2026
The challenge holder is seeking an innovative, secure and commercially viable way to use cloud-based, AI-enabled engineering and manufacturing tools while protecting sensitive customer and defence-related data.
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iX Challenge: Distributed Smartphone-Based Detection and Mapping of PNT Signal Interference
Opens: 05/10/2026
Closes: 06/11/2026
A NW based company is seeking an Android based innovative, scalable capability to detect, geolocate and map deliberate radio-frequency interference affecting positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) services, including GPS jamming, in near real time.
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iX Challenge: Resilient High-Altitude Communications, Navigation and Mission Connectivity for Persistent Autonomous Aircraft
Opens: 05/10/2026
Closes: 06/11/2026
Innovate UK Business Connect is supporting Advanced Integrated Technologies Ltd (AiT) to identify innovative technologies capable of providing reliable, resilient and low-SWaP command, control, navigation and mission-data connectivity for a persistent autonomous aircraft operating in the stratosphere.
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iX Challenge: Edge AI with Low Size, Weight, Power, and Cost
Opens: 05/10/2026
Closes: 06/11/2026
The iX programme is supporting Tekh to identify innovative hardware partners capable of developing low Size, Weight, Power and Cost (SWaP-C) computing hardware for Edge AI. The challenge will investigate how far AI compute can be reduced while retaining sufficient inference performance to deliver useful capability in constrained operational environments.
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iX Challenge: Extending protection to personnel travelling in armoured vehicles under drone attack
Opens: 05/10/2026
Closes: 06/11/2026
VSS is looking to use open innovation to improve the survivability of personnel travelling in armoured vehicles when under drone attacks.
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iX Challenge: Verified reporting of the value created by defence contracts
Opens: 05/10/2026
Closes: 06/11/2026
The iX programme is supporting e50K to find innovators who can capture, verify and deduplicate social value delivery across a multi-tier supply chain, so that the value a contract creates can be evidenced rather than asserted.
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Sustainable Medicines Manufacturing Innovation: CR&D Round 2
Opens: 05/10/2026
Closes: 02/12/2026
Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation, will work with the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) to invest up to £7 million to support the development and adoption of sustainable technologies for the manufacturing of medicines.
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Investor Partnerships – Battery Innovation Programme
Opens: 05/10/2026
Closes: 25/11/2026
UK registered SMEs can apply for grant funding alongside private investment from selected investor partners.
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Eureka collaborative R&D: Globalstars Japan 2027
Opens: 07/10/2026
Closes: 20/01/2027
UK registered organisations can apply for a share of £2 million for collaborative industrial research projects with partners from Japan and select Eureka countries.
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ADOPT Facilitator Support Grant: Round 12
Opens: 01/10/2026
Closes: 11/11/2026
Farming, growing or forestry businesses based in England can apply for a grant of £2,500, to engage an external Project Facilitator to support the development of a Full ADOPT Grant application.
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FOAK Builder: working towards climate tech first-of-a-kind deployment
Opens: 07/10/2026
Closes: 05/11/2026
Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), will invest a minimum of £4.77 million to support ambitious, late-stage climate tech businesses as they move towards commercial scale deployment.
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Manufacturing Digitalisation Innovation Programme: Innovation and Scale-up Hub
Opens: 02/10/2026
Closes: 18/11/2026
UK registered RTOs or academic institutions can apply for a share of up to £4 million to build a hub to improve the targeting, quality and commercial impact of grant funded activity.
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Engineering Biology Investor Partnerships Round 1
Opens: 01/10/2026
Closes: 02/12/2026
UK registered SMEs can apply for a share of up to £8 million to develop engineering biology products and services with selected investor partners.