Sovereign AI - Proof of concept

Your project must:

• have a grant funding request between £50,000 and £120,000
• start by 1 January 2026
• end by 31 March 2026
• last between 1 and 3 months
• carry out all of its project work in the UK

Projects must always start on the first of the month, even if this is a non-working day. You must not start your project until your Grant Offer Letter has been approved by Innovate UK. Any delays within Project Setup may mean we need to delay your project start date.

You must only include eligible project costs in your application. See our overview of eligible project costs. For specific guidance, see the eligibility section in this competition.

Project leadership

A business can only lead on one application. If a business is not leading any application, it can use a subcontractor.

Lead organisation: to work alone your organisation must be a UK-registered business of any size.

More information on the different types of organisation can be found in our Funding rules.

Subcontractors

• Subcontractors are allowed in this competition
• Subcontractors can be from anywhere in the UK and you must select them through your usual procurement process
• You cannot use subcontractors from overseas
• All subcontractor costs must be justified and appropriate to the total eligible project costs
• Subcontracting costs are limited to 20% of total project costs

A minimum of £1.6 million has been allocated to fund innovation projects in this competition. This is subject to a sufficient number of high quality applications being received. Funding will be in the form of a grant.

We reserve the right to adjust funding allocations for any of our competitions under exceptional circumstances, for example, in response to changes in policy, portfolio funding considerations, or broader government funding decisions.

If your organisation’s work on the project is commercial or economic, your funding request must not exceed the limits below. These limits apply even if your organisation normally acts non-economically but for the purpose of this project will be undertaking commercial or economic activity.

Choose the applicable categories below for the Research, Development and Innovation Streamlined Subsidy Scheme.

Category 1 feasibility studies

• up to 70% if you are a micro or small organisation
• up to 60% if you are a medium-sized organisation
• up to 50% if you are a large organisation

Category 2 industrial research projects

• up to 70% if you are a micro or small organisation
• up to 60% if you are a medium-sized organisation
• up to 50% if you are a large organisation

The aim of this competition is to demonstrate Proof of Concept of AI technologies with state of the art performance in areas of strategic importance to UK. This will ensure that frontier AI technologies are developed in the UK, safeguarding UK’s future economic growth and security and geo-strategic influence.

Your technology must have in principle the ability to scale at pace, but you are not required to prove or validate scalability. We are expecting projects to deliver technologies at Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 3 to 5.

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 the technology is further developed.

Your proposal must deliver one or more of the following:

• proof of Concept of architecture or subsystem component
• technical validation of capability of system or subsystem component
• frontier AI performance that delivers new to the world capability or state of the performance of existing capability
• ability of architecture and business model to scale
• demonstrate a clear path for access to data
• demonstrate strategy to access compute infrastructure and quantify requirement for compute

Portfolio approach

We want to fund a variety of projects across different technologies, markets, technological maturities, research categories and themes. We call this a portfolio approach.

Your project must focus on one or more of the following:

• Fundamental AI research:
  • embodied AI, sensory motor grounded systems
  • safe by design architectures, multi agent systems, agentic AI
  • novel architectures including neuro symbolic, neuromorphic and biologically inspired models
• AI for materials discovery of:
  • material discovery and property prediction
  • safe by design architectures, multi agent systems, agentic AI
  • novel architectures including neuro symbolic, neuromorphic and biologically inspired models
• AI for biosciences and health:
  • genomics and multi omics models for medicines discovery
  • foundational patient level health models
  • foundational bioscience models
  • scalable and secure monitoring and evaluation of health AI
• AI for defence and national security:
  • real time and near real time systems
  • distributed and decentralised systems
  • specialised models for critical infrastructure management and cybersecurity
• AI aided design for:
  • AI accelerator chips
  • neuromorphic hardware
  • optical backplanes

We will fund feasibility projects and industrial research projects, as defined in the guidance on categories of research.

• Publication date: 11 August 2025
• Online briefing event: 15 August 2025, 11:30 am
  Briefing slides will be available to download from Supporting Information after the event.
• Registration close date: 10 September 2025
• Invite to interview: TBC
• Interview panel: TBC
• Applicants notified: 14 October 2025
• Successful applicant briefing: TBC
• Project start from: 1 January 2026

Briefing event

An online briefing was held on 15 August 2025. Watch the recorded briefing event and read the briefing slides.

Accessibility and Inclusion

We 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.

We recommend you contact us at least 15 working days before this competition’s closing date to allow us to put the most suitable support in place. The support we can provide may be limited if you contact us close to the competition deadline.

You can contact Innovate UK by email or call 0300 321 4357. Our phone lines are open from 9am to 12pm and 2pm to 5pm UK time, Monday to Friday (excluding bank holidays).