Overview
This competition supports the development of high-quality benchmarking datasets and evaluation tools for frontier AI models. Projects will focus on creating representative dataset slices, alongside fully curated and annotated datasets that can be used to train and validate advanced AI systems.
Applicants must demonstrate clear commercialisation pathways, including how datasets will be accessed, licensed, and used by industry. Strong proposals will show how their outputs improve on existing datasets and unlock new opportunities for AI development.
Projects must align with at least one of two priority areas: AI-enabled health and life sciences or advanced materials. Collaborative approaches are encouraged, particularly where data owners and technical delivery partners come together to create scalable and valuable AI resources.
Scope
The aim of this competition is to support projects that create high-quality benchmarks based on representative dataset slices to enable the evaluation of new AI models, while also developing larger, AI-ready annotated and curated datasets.
Projects must demonstrate clear:
- benefits of proposed outputs over existing data assets
- industry opportunity unlocked and enabled
- benefits in evaluation and training of AI models with generalised capabilities
- benefits in supporting evaluation of Frontier AI models
To be in scope of this competition projects must sufficiently describe:
- serviceable market and customers
- specific added value through curation, annotation and provision of dataset and benchmark
- how the dataset will unlock development and validation of Frontier AI technologies
Key themes and topics
Projects must focus on one or more of the following:
Theme 1: AI Enabled Health and Life Sciences: making the UK the best place to develop and deploy AI for drug discovery, development and manufacturing of medicines, clinical trials and healthcare delivery.
Projects must focus on one of the following priorities:
- medicines discovery
- medicines development and manufacturing process optimisation
- predictive healthcare applications to support healthcare delivery
- clinical trials
- genomics and multi-omics may be used as enabling technologies across any of the above areas, where relevant
Theme 2: Advanced Materials with AI: building a world leading AI-first materials R&D capability, including applications in aerospace, net zero technologies, defence and semiconductors.
Projects must focus on one of the following priorities:
- material prediction: generative models and multi objective optimisation
- physics Machine Learning (ML) models for discovery and simulation acceleration
- multimodal knowledge discovery platforms
Projects that will not be funded:
- projects that do not sufficiently provide a quantified serviceable addressable market
- projects that do not sufficiently provide clear background IP ownership or rights
- projects that do not sufficiently provide a specific defensibility route
- projects that do not align with the competition theme and specific priority areas
- projects that do not sufficiently provide a named baseline with metrics and numeric targets for validation
- projects that do not sufficiently address the scope of the competition
- projects that are primarily literature review studies, requirement gathering, without substantive experimental R&D
- projects that propose routine integration, deployment, orchestration or productisation of existing AI tools or third-party models without novel AI or ML development
- projects that are not delivering measurable and specific objectives
- projects that are primarily routine integration or deployment of existing AI tools without substantive technical innovation
- projects that do not have clear technical novelty and feasibility challenge
- projects that do not result in defensible foreground IP
- projects that focus primarily on non-AI or ML R&D
- projects that develop fully autonomous targeting
- projects that primarily develop hardware where AI is only a secondary feature
Project duration
6 to 12 months
Must start by 01 September 2026
End by 31 August 2027
Award value
Grant funding request between £500,000 and £750,000
Funding rates
For industrial research projects, purposeful research that builds new knowledge and skills to improve or develop products, processes, or services, you can get funding for eligible project costs of:
- 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
Research organisations can share up to 20% of the total eligible project costs
Eligibility criteria
- Projects must be collaborative and led by a UK registered business of any size or an RTO
- Projects must include at least one grant claiming SME
- Collaborators can be a UK registered business of any size; an academic institution; a charity; a not for profit; a public sector organisation; or a research and technology organisation (RTO)
- Subcontractors must be UK-based with fully justified and appropriate costs (overseas subcontractors are not permitted)
- All funded project work must be carried out within the UK (except non-funded partners, where applicable)
- Projects must intend to exploit the results from or in the UK
- Subsidy control and state aid rules apply (Research, Development and Innovation Streamlined Subsidy Scheme)
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