: AI Champions: Frontier AI Phase 1 | PNO Innovation

AI Champions: Frontier AI Phase 1

UK registered SME businesses can apply for a share of up to £3 million to deliver feasibility studies for frontier artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) technologies with a clear route defensible scale-up. This is funded by Innovate UK.

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In Short

Project Duration Project Duration

3 - 6 months

Funding Available Funding Available

Between £150,000 and £250,000

Application Deadline Application Deadline

Wednesday 29 April 2026

Themes

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

  • predictive healthcare
  • medicines discovery
  • medicines manufacturing optimisation
  • genomics and multi-omics

  • material prediction, generative models & multi objective optimisation
  • physics-ML models for discovery and simulation acceleration
  • multimodal knowledge discovery platforms

  • AI driven assured multi-source fusion and analytics for distributed heterogeneous information, multimodal systems for decision support
  • edge autonomy and robust decision, control AI systems, Low-Swap inference, quantum-AI & semiconductor-AI for novel underwater sensors
  • secure and robust AI, ML driven signal processing, AI for acoustic signal processing & digital EW

  • abstract reasoning and generalisation
  • novel AI, ML architectures & methodologies, online learning and world model learning systems
  • generalisable explainable AI

Your proposal must fall within one or more of the 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.

Eligibility

Your project must: have total costs between £150,000 and £250,000; last between 3 to 6 months; start by 1st August 2026; end 31st January 2027. Any funded organisation needs to carry out their project work in the UK and must intend to exploit the project results from or in the UK.

Our Approach

The UK team has a strong track record in securing some of the most competitive national and European grants on behalf of its clients, with a full understanding of how a project should be presented to stand the highest chance of success. Each year in the UK alone, we are responsible for the submission of more than 100 funding applications across all sectors and priority areas. Based on this extensive experience, through careful project selection and using key insight into how a project should be best positioned, we consistently achieve success rates that are more than 5 times the typical success rates for UK national schemes and EU programmes.

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