To work alone your organisation must be a UK registered micro, small or medium sized enterprise (SME). Subcontractors are not allowed in this competition.

An SME can only submit on one application. Any further applications by the same organisation will be made ineligible.

Your project must:

• have total costs between £150,000 and £250,000
• last between 1 and 3 months
• start by 1 April 2027
• end by 30 June 2027

Any organisation receiving funding must carry out its project work in the UK, intend to exploit the results in the UK, and spend most of the funding within the UK. Subcontractors are not allowed in this competition.

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 support UK SMEs to validate the technical feasibility of ambitious AI, and ML innovations that could deliver step change improvements or enable new products, services and platforms.

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

Your project must have 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.

Your project must start at a Technology Readiness Level between 1 and 3 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 on 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.

Your project must have AI as the core technical contribution and the main source of operational advantage.

In this Phase 1 competition, your project must deliver:

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

Within the scope question, 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 capability across the materials research, development and innovation pipeline, 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 ML models for discovery and simulation acceleration
• multimodal knowledge discovery platforms
• generalisable world models or data efficient learning for materials process optimisation and manufacturing scale up
• open set or uncertainty aware models for materials characterisation, defect detection and diagnosis

Theme 3: Secure AI for National Security and Defence (NS&D): Enable the UK’s defence sector to become a leading integrator of secure AI enhanced command and control, and AI enabled sensors. You must focus on one of the following priorities:

• Advanced AI and Autonomous Decision Systems: AI systems for decision advantage and mission delivery, AI driven multi-source data fusion and analytics, hybrid AI architectures for causal and multi-step planning systems with adaptive reasoning
• Resilient Edge Intelligence: AI systems for effective deployment in degraded, denied and contested environments. AI native hybrid quantum-AI and semiconductor-AI for novel sensing, low SWaP inference and neuromorphic technologies to improve detection and classification

UKRI is committed to maximising the contribution that intellectual and knowledge assets, including intellectual property, arising from research and innovation we fund, can make to supporting national security and defence, including through dual use. See the UKRI published guidance on National Security and Defence research for more information

Theme 4: AI safety and assurance technologies: Technical methods, evaluation infrastructure and control mechanisms that enable AI systems to be tested, constrained and verified against safety relevant failures. You must focus on one of the following priorities:

• agentic runtime control and action assurance, including technologies for constraining, verifying, authorising or interrupting actions taken by autonomous and tool using AI systems
• dynamic AI evaluation, simulation and safety test environments, for evaluating dynamic system level behaviour
• formal and runtime verification for AI enabled systems for autonomous or safety critical systems
• automated adaptive adversarial safety testing, including technologies that automatically generate, discover and reproduce previously unknown AI safety failures

We are not funding projects that:

• do not sufficiently provide a quantified serviceable addressable market
• do not sufficiently provide clear background IP ownership or rights
• do not sufficiently provide a specific defensibility route
• do not align with the competition theme and specific priority areas
• do not sufficiently provide a named baseline with metrics and numeric targets for validation
• do not sufficiently address the scope of the competition
• are primarily literature review studies, requirement gathering, without substantive experimental R&D
• propose routine integration, deployment, orchestration or productization of existing AI tools or third party models without novel AI or ML development
• are not delivering measurable and specific objectives
• are primarily routine integration or deployment of existing AI tools without substantive technical innovation
• don’t have clear technical novelty and feasibility challenge
• do not result in defensible foreground IP
• focus primarily on non-AI, ML R&D and development, including cross-cutting projects
• develop fully autonomous targeting
• whose primary purpose is the development of hardware, including sensor hardware, quantum hardware, platforms, or other enabling infrastructure, where AI is only a secondary feature, add on analytics layer, or downstream application

Innovate UK will hold an online briefing event on Wednesday 7 October 2026 at 11.30am: register to attend (Zoom required). A recording and slides will be available afterwards.

You can also contact Innovate UK Business Connect’s Robotics & AI team for advice.