£90k to £175k for UK companies who are inventing frontier AI.
There's a new Innovate UK competition for UK SMEs that are doing original AI and machine learning research; £90k to £175k for a project of one to three months. It closes on 11 November. The criteria are quite specific, meaning it isn't for every AI company, which is why we recommend registering with the Grantify platform to check your eligibility first.
Check your fit for freeFrontier AI: SME Champions at a glance
Phase 1 of the Innovate UK Frontier AI competition in four numbers.
Getting the grant comes down to where the invention is.
Innovate UK calls this frontier AI, and they mean something quite specific by it, i.e. systems that beat current performance on a named benchmark, or do something no system does yet. The advance has to come from the AI itself; the architecture, the training method, the learning algorithms or the control algorithms.
While that might sound like a technicality, it's the thing that decides most applications before anyone has scored them. If you've built the model, this is for you. If you've built on someone else's model, and the clever part is the application, the workflow or the interface, then unfortunately this grant isn't for you. But AI is one of the UK government's investment priorities and new funding opens all the time, so register free and see what you do match.
Register freeSo are you a fit?
Weeding through the complexity of the application criteria and process, you're probably a fit if you meet the criteria listed here.
Where you probably aren't a fit is if you're deploying something that already works, if the project is mainly hardware or materials engineering with AI as the analytics on top, or if any of the work would happen outside the UK.
Plenty of good AI companies will read that and realise this isn't one for them, but if that's you then we'd still suggest you register with Grantify, because there's potentially other funding open that will suit you better and our platform will show you what.
- You're a UK business of up to 249 people, applying on your own
- You can say what's new about your AI in a sentence, and name the baseline you expect to beat
- There's a single technical unknown you could settle in one to three months
- You own your background IP, or have the rights to it
- You can fund 30% to 40% of the project yourself and wait to be paid in arrears
The four themes at the heart of the grant.
Your project has to fit one theme and one named priority inside it. If it doesn't, it won't be sent for assessment. Just to add, in our experience a project that has been stretched to fit a theme will likely read that way to an assessor.
AI-enabled health and life sciences
Predictive healthcare, medicines discovery, medicines manufacturing optimisation, genomics and multi-omics.
Advanced materials with AI
Materials prediction and generative models, physics ML for discovery and simulation, multimodal knowledge discovery, data-efficient learning for process optimisation and scale-up, and uncertainty-aware models for characterisation and defect detection.
Secure AI for national security and defence
Advanced AI and autonomous decision systems, and resilient edge intelligence. Fully autonomous targeting is excluded.
AI safety and assurance technologies
Runtime control and action assurance for agents, dynamic evaluation and safety test environments, formal and runtime verification, and automated adversarial safety testing.
From 'is it worth it?' to submitted, in weeks not months.
Three steps from registration to an application you can stand behind.
Match
Answer a series of questions about your business and your technology, and validate your eligibility. Get a named match to Frontier AI: SME Champions (and any other grants you qualify for) with an indicative funding value.
Plan
Get your full report and book in with one of Grantify's most experienced Account Executives. We'll walk you through whether this competition is the right one for you, what the assessors score and where applications typically fall down.
Apply
Build your application with up to 3 hours of Advisor calls and 24/7 platform access to model answers and guidance. You get two in-depth reviews, proofreading and polishing, and a final quality check before you submit.
The money, and the bit people miss.
Project costs have to fall between £150,000 and £250,000. Innovate UK pays up to 70% of that for micro and small companies and up to 60% for medium-sized ones, and you fund the rest.
So a small company with a £200,000 project receives £140,000 and puts in £60,000. The bit people miss is that claims are paid in arrears; you'll be carrying the project's costs until the money lands, and Innovate UK checks you can afford to before it funds you.
Two other things we'd want to know if we were applying. The pot is £3.1m, which is somewhere between 18 and 34 projects across all four themes. And Innovate UK may take a portfolio approach, i.e. a spread across themes and technologies, so a well-scoring application can still miss out if it's already covered.
Why Phase 1 is the most important one to get into.
This is the first of three phases, and only the companies funded in Phase 1 will be invited to apply for Phase 2.
While £175k is useful, for us it's what comes after that makes this worth a serious application.
UK founders who got through.
Closes 11 November.
Each company gets one application, and you can't reuse one you've submitted before. That's a good reason not to be writing it in the final week.
Check my eligibility1 October 2026
The competition opens.
13 October 2026
The last day you can register with Grantify and have enough time to craft a truly competitive application.
11 November 2026, 11am GMT
Applications close.
26 January 2027
Applicants are notified of their results.
By 1 April 2027
Your project starts, on the first day of a month.
By 30 June 2027
Your project finishes.
Where Grantify comes in.
We know how assessors score, because we've watched them score. We've secured more than £200M for over 650 companies, and every one of those applications, funded or not, has taught us something about the next.
It starts with the fit check. You register for free and the platform tells you whether this competition matches your company and project, and what else does. From there we'll tell you how your project looks against the criteria before you spend a penny. If it stacks up, our platform and funding experts work with you on the application itself; the baseline, the metrics, the market case and the costs.
It closes on 11 November. Finding out whether it's yours takes a few minutes.
Free registration. Named match and indicative value in minutes. Applications close 11am GMT, 11 November 2026.
No, this one is for single companies.
No. Subcontracting and overseas work aren't permitted on this competition.
Only if there's real new AI or ML research in what you're doing. Packaging, orchestrating or fine-tuning existing models without a new technical contribution is unlikely to get through.
30% of project costs if you're a micro or small company and 40% if you're medium-sized. On a £150,000 project that's £45,000 or £60,000.
In arrears, against claims.
It has to start by 1 April 2027 and finish by 30 June 2027.
The grant itself is free, and registering to check your fit costs nothing. There's a fee to apply with Grantify's support and a success fee if you're awarded.
Then you'll know in a few minutes rather than a few weeks, and the platform will show you the funding opportunities that do match.