Sovereign AI – Proof of Concept

The Sovereign AI – Proof of Concept competition is part of the UK’s strategy to secure leadership in AI technologies. Innovate UK is inviting proposals from UK-registered businesses to develop demonstrators that showcase state-of-the-art performance in strategically important AI areas.

Funding Scope

• Total competition funding: up to £120,000
• Project types: Feasibility projects and industrial research projects
• TRL requirement: Projects must deliver TRL 3 to 5 technologies
• Duration: Projects must demonstrate Proof of Concept capability, focusing on key critical components and using synthetic or simulated data if needed

Eligible Focus Areas

Projects must target one or more of the following:

1. Fundamental AI research

• Embodied AI and sensory-motor grounded systems
• Safe-by-design architectures, multi-agent systems, agentic AI
• Novel architectures including neuro-symbolic, neuromorphic, and biologically inspired models

2. AI for materials discovery

• Generative and physics-ML hybrid models
• Automated workflows and closed-loop discovery
• Materials property prediction

3. AI for biosciences and health

• Genomics and multi-omics models for medicine discovery
• Foundational health and bioscience models
• Scalable and secure monitoring and evaluation of health AI

4. AI for defence and national security

• Real-time and distributed systems
• Critical infrastructure management and cybersecurity models

5. AI-aided design

• AI accelerator chips
• Neuromorphic hardware
• Optical backplanes

Portfolio Approach

Innovate UK will fund a variety of projects across sectors and technology types to build a broad and strategically valuable AI capability in the UK.

Who Can Apply

• UK registered businesses of any size
• Projects must show potential to scale in principle
• Literature reviews, non-R&D projects, and those without measurable objectives will not be funded

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