Overview
This Innovate UK competition will invest up to £8 million to support late-stage agri-tech innovations progressing towards full-scale production and market adoption.
The focus is on accelerating the transition from validated technologies to manufacturing at scale. Projects should demonstrate how products, systems and supply chains will be developed to support commercial deployment, while improving agricultural productivity and sustainability.
This strand is best suited to businesses that are close to market and need to prove production readiness, scalability and end-user adoption.
Scope
The aim of this competition is to enable Agri-tech innovators to advance their product performance and reliability, and their manufacturing and supply chain capability, to achieve production at scale. Your project should target getting products to market to accelerate end user adoption, and to drive UK Agri-tech frontier industry growth and UK agricultural productivity and sustainability.
Your project must demonstrate how it will move your business, technologies and products closer to manufacturing readiness, production at scale and lead to market adoption. You must also include a robust business plan that supports production and market scale up.
Key themes and topics
Projects must focus on one or more of the following:
- Technologies enabling automation to reduce labour demand and improve productivity and sustainability across agriculture, forestry, horticulture and aquaculture
- Automation and robotic systems and equipment
- Automated sensing, monitoring and intelligent decision-making systems
- Identification and resolution of manufacturing, engineering, performance or regulatory challenges
- Approaches that accelerate time to market, attract investment and support commercial scale-up
- Technologies with clear farmer or grower demand and long-term market potential, including export opportunities
- Design and testing of systems for reliable operation at scale
- Design for manufacture, assembly and production system optimisation
- Supply chain development and procurement strategies
- Regulatory and safety compliance testing
- Validation and verification of software, navigation, safety and deployment systems
- Integration with existing systems and workflows
- Field, workshop and lab trials to prove performance, reliability and uptime in real-world conditions
- Diagnostics, maintenance and product support systems
Projects will not be funded if they:
- Are early-stage or feasibility studies
- Focus on unproven concepts without clear commercial pathways
- Lack a defined route to market
- Are equine-specific or related to wild fisheries
- Focus on pharmaceuticals, bioeconomy systems or fermentation for human consumption
Project duration
Between 6 and 18 months
Must start by 01 January 2027
End by 30 June 2028
Award value
Total project costs must be between £1 million to £3 million
Funding rates
For experimental development projects, which focus on refining and validating innovations closer to market, funding is available for eligible project costs of:
- up to 45% for micro or small organisations
- up to 35% for medium sized organisations
- up to 25% for large organisations
Research organisations can share up to 70% of the total eligible project costs
Eligibility criteria
- Projects must be collaborative and led by a UK registered business of any size
- Collaborators can include UK registered businesses, academic institutions, charities, not-for-profits, public sector organisations or RTOs
- Subcontractors must be preferably UK-based with fully justified and appropriate costs
- All funded project work must be carried out within the UK
- Projects must intend to exploit results in or from the UK
- Subsidy control rules apply under the Research, Development and Innovation Streamlined Subsidy Scheme
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