Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), will invest a minimum of £4.5 million on Frontier AI Benchmarking Datasets. This funding is from Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation and is subject to a sufficient number of high quality applications being received.
The aim of this competition is to support projects that create high-quality benchmarks based on representative dataset slices to enable the evaluation of new AI models, while also developing larger, AI-ready annotated and curated datasets.
The full dataset should be accompanied with clear plans for further utilisation, including commercial exploitation through licensing or intellectual property, and clear routes for industry access and use, aligned with the following thematic priorities:
The Frontier AI Benchmarking Datasets solutions must align with one or more of the two missions:
- AI-Enabled Health and Life Sciences: Making the UK the best place to develop and deploy AI across medicines discovery, development and manufacturing, predictive healthcare applications, and clinical trials.
- Advanced Materials with AI: Building a world leading AI-first materials R&D capability spanning aerospace, net zero technologies, defence materials, semiconductors.
These will be to create benchmark datasets and evaluation harnesses to enable robust, comparable evaluation of AI models in priority thematic areas and further support training of new AI models.
We encourage applications from consortia that bring together data-owning organisations and partners with expertise in data engineering, annotation and benchmarking. Strong applications will clearly demonstrate the value add the benchmarking and datasets will bring to the development and validation of AI and ML models over existing benchmarks and datasets available.
Your proposal must deliver all of the following:
- an open benchmark package including benchmark task definition and evaluation protocol; an openly accessible benchmark dataset; complete evaluation harness usable by third parties; documentation and metadate
- a fully curated and annotated full dataset
- details on the Intellectual Property (IP) licence and access route governing the full dataset slice
Applications involving data from Theme 1 must demonstrate appropriate data governance and privacy protections. Any released data must be anonymised or de-identified.
Our experience from similar competitions suggests that you could have a 10% chance of success.
-
To lead a collaborative project your organisation must be a UK registered business of any size or RTO. The consortium must contain at least one UK registered micro, small or medium sized enterprise (SME) claiming grant funding on this application.
If the lead organisation is an RTO it must collaborate with two businesses (one SME, and one business of any size).
To collaborate with the lead, your organisation must be one of the following UK registered:
- business of any size
- academic institution
- charity
- not for profit
- public sector organisation
- research and technology organisation (RTO)
A business or research and technology organisation (RTO) can only lead on one application but can be included as a collaborator in a further two applications.
If a business is not leading any application, it can collaborate in a further two applications.
If an RTO is not leading any application, it can collaborate in any number of applications.
An academic institution, charity, not for profit or public sector organisation can collaborate on any number of applications.
-
Projects in this competition must be collaborative.
Your project must:
- have total costs of between £500,000 and £750,000
- last between 6 and 12 months
- start by 1 September 2026
- end by 31 August 2027
-
The aim of this competition is to support projects that create high-quality benchmarks based on representative dataset slices to enable the evaluation of new AI models, while also developing larger, AI-ready annotated and curated datasets.
Your project must demonstrate clear:
- benefits of proposed outputs over existing data assets
- industry opportunity unlocked and enabled
- benefits in evaluation and training of AI models with generalised capabilities
- benefits in supporting evaluation of Frontier AI models
To be in scope of this competition your project must sufficiently describe:
- serviceable market and customers
- specific added value through curation, annotation and provision of dataset and benchmark
- how your dataset will unlock development and validation of Frontier AI technologies
-
Your project must focus on one or more of the following:
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:
- medicines discovery
- medicines development and manufacturing process optimisation
- predictive healthcare applications to support healthcare delivery
- clinical trials
- genomics and multi-omics may be used as enabling technologies across any of the above areas, where relevant
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 and multi objective optimisation
- physics Machine Learning (ML) models for discovery and simulation acceleration
- multimodal knowledge discovery platforms
-
Innovate UK will hold an online briefing at 2pm on Tuesday 28 April: click here to register for a place. A recording will be available afterwards.
If you would like help to find a collaborator, contact Innovate UK Business Connect’s AI team.
Innovate UK's application and funding process
If you need more information about how to apply, please read our funding support pages. For additional support, reach out to our team of innovation experts who are ready to help you navigate the application process and maximise your chances of success.
For more information
Accessibility and Inclusion
Innovate UK welcome and encourage applications from people of all backgrounds and are committed to making our application process accessible to everyone. This includes making reasonable adjustments, for people who have a disability or a long-term condition and face barriers applying to us.