To work alone your organisation must be a UK registered SME.

Collaborations and subcontractors are not allowed in this competition.

A business can only lead on one application.

Your project must:

• have total costs between £150,000 and £250,000 (up to 70% of costs can be covered)
• last between 3 to 6 months
• start by 1st August 2026
• end 31st January 2027

Any funded organisation needs to carry out their project work in the UK and must intend to exploit the project results from or in the UK.

The aim of this competition is to advance the development of state-of-the-art artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in the UK. We will fund UK SMEs to validate the technical feasibility of ambitious AI, and ML innovations that could delivery step-change improvements in capability and enable new products, services or platforms.

Within the context of this competition series, we will consider Frontier AI to be any AI, ML systems that deliver state-of-the-art performance against benchmarks or genuinely new-to-the-world capability in clearly specified area, where the advance is attributable to innovation in one of or more of:

• model, system architecture
• training methodology
• core control or learning algorithm

Your project must focus on novel AI and ML technology and methodology development and validate the objectives of Phase 1 outcomes with clear metrics.

We are looking for applications with a clear route to defensibility, such as protectable IP, proprietary data advantage, specialist know-how or other credible barriers to entry, with a path to scale.

Projects must start at a Technology Readiness Level of 3 or below at time of application.

Your technology must have in principle the ability to scale at pace, but you are not required to prove or validate scalability during Phase 1.

Your project must demonstrate the ability of your technology to work in principle. You can focus in demonstrating at least the key critical component and you can utilise synthetic and simulated data for validation. You need to demonstrate how you will achieve state of the art performance if capability already exists, or new to the world capability if this genuinely novel capability.

Funding will be reserved for projects in which AI is the core technical contribution and the main source of operational advantage.

Your proposal must deliver (Phase 1):

• proof of concept prototype of the whole stack or the core architecture or critical subsystem component
• a clear validation methodology against predefined metrics
• evidence of technical novelty
• a scaling rationale for the technology and business model
• a technical white paper

To be in scope of this competition your project must sufficiently describe:

• Serviceable market and customers
• Background IP and route to defensibility
• Technical novelty and benchmarked validation
• One key uncertainty you will resolve during Phase 1

Your proposal must fall within one or more of the following themes, You must focus on one specific priority within each theme you select. If your application does not align with the theme and specific priority you select, it will not be sent for assessment.

Theme 1: AI-Enabled Health and Life Sciences. Making the UK the best place to develop and deploy AI for drug discovery, development and manufacturing of medicines, clinical trials, and healthcare delivery.

You must focus on one of the following priorities:

• predictive healthcare
• medicines discovery
• medicines manufacturing optimisation
• genomics and multi-omics

Theme 2: Advanced Materials with AI. Building a world-leading AI-first materials R&D capability (including applications in aerospace, net zero technologies, defence and semiconductors)

You must focus on one of the following priorities:

• material prediction, generative models & multi objective optimisation
• physics-ML models for discovery and simulation acceleration
• multimodal knowledge discovery platforms

Theme 3: Secure AI for National Security & Defence (NS&D). Enable the UK’s defence sector to become a leading integrator of secure AI-enhanced command & control and AI enabled sensors.

You must focus on one of the following priorities:

• AI driven assured multi-source fusion and analytics for distributed heterogeneous information, multimodal systems for decision support
• edge autonomy and robust decision, control AI systems, Low-Swap inference, quantum-AI & semiconductor-AI for novel underwater sensors
• secure and robust AI, ML driven signal processing, AI for acoustic signal processing & digital EW

Theme 4, Fundamental AI. Advancing foundational AI capabilities that can underpin multiple sectors and future applications.

You must focus on one of the following priorities:

• abstract reasoning and generalisation
• novel AI, ML architectures & methodologies, online learning and world model learning systems
• generalisable explainable AI

Innovate UK will hold a webinar briefing on Zoom at 11am on Wednesday 18 March: click here to register for a place. A recording and slides will be available afterwards.

For advice, you can contact Innovate UK Business Connect’s Robotics & AI team.