Innovate UK is offering up to £525k to fund projects that create AI benchmarking datasets and evaluation tools in health, life sciences, and advanced materials.
Running from 21 April to 27 May 2026, the Frontier AI Benchmarking Datasets competition will fund the creation, curation, annotation, and exploitation of FAIR data and benchmarks that can fuel the growth of the UK’s AI industry.
Below, I have explained the key things you need to know about this competition before you apply: who is eligible, how much funding is available, and what the application process looks like.
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Who is Eligible?
Your Project
With this competition, Innovate UK is looking to fund projects that “create high-quality benchmarks based on representative dataset slices to enable the evaluation of new AI models”.
In line with this objective, your project must focus on at least one of the competition’s two main themes:
- 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.
- Advanced Materials with AI: building a world-leading AI-first materials R&D capability, including applications in aerospace, net zero technologies, defence and semiconductors.
Your project must demonstrate clear:
- Benefits in evaluation and training of AI models with generalised capabilities
- Benefits in supporting the evaluation of Frontier AI models
- Benefits of proposed outputs over existing data assets
- Industry opportunity unlocked and enabled
In addition, your project must:
- Be an Industrial Research project, meaning aimed at acquiring new knowledge for developing new products, processes, or services
- Have total eligible costs of between £500,000 and £750,000
- Start by 1 September 2026
- Last 6 to 12 months
All funded work must be carried out in the UK, and you must intend to exploit the project results from or within the UK.
Your Organisation and Partners
All project teams must include at least one UK-registered micro, small or medium-sized enterprise (SME).
Collaborative projects – those delivered by multiple organisations working together – must be led by a UK-registered business of any size or a research and technology organisation (RTO). Consortia led by RTOs must include two other UK businesses, one of which must be an SME.
To collaborate with the lead, you must be one of the following UK-registered organisations:
- Academic institution
- Business of any size
- Charity or not-for-profit
- Public sector organisation
- RTO
The lead and at least one other organisation must apply for funding, and no single partner can account for more than 70% of the total eligible project costs.
How Much Funding Can I Apply For?
Individual grants range from £250,000 to £525,000.
However, the exact amount you can claim depends on your organisation’s type and size and the sort of research your project involves.
Funding for Businesses
As a business, the percentage of your qualifying costs covered by your grant depends on your size. The table below explains how much is available.
| Company Size | Micro and Small | Medium | Large |
|---|---|---|---|
| Percentage of Costs Covered | 70% | 60% | 50% |
Funding Example
If your eligible project costs are £600,000 and you are a micro or small business, you could receive a grant of up to £420,000 (70% of your investment).
You will need to fund the remaining £225,000 from other sources, like R&D Tax Relief, investment or loans.
Funding for Non-Commercial Organisations
Research organisations undertaking non-economic activity as part of the project can share up to 20% of the total eligible project costs.
Of that 20%, you can get funding for your eligible project costs of up to:
- 100% of your eligible project costs if you are an RTO, charity, not-for-profit, public sector organisation, or research organisation
- 80% of full economic costs (FEC) if you are a Je-S registered institution, like a university
How Do I Apply?
You apply through Innovate UK’s Innovation Funding Service (IFS).
As with most Innovate UK competitions, the application for Frontier AI Benchmarking Datasets is split into four sections:
- Project Details (not scored)
- Application Questions (partially scored)
- Finances
- Project Impact (not scored)
Application Questions is the longest section and the place where you’ll need to spend the most time. It has 17 questions in total:
- 7 unscored administrative questions covering topics like theme selection, applicant location and international collaboration
- 10 scored questions covering areas like technical development and validation, team and resources and outcomes and route to market
You can include appendices (up to two A4 pages) for the technical development, team, project management, and risk questions.
Each partner organisation must also complete the Project Impact section before submission.
If you’re successful, you’ll be notified by 29 June 2026.
Like with most competitions, Innovate UK takes a ‘portfolio approach’ by funding projects across different technologies, markets and technological maturities. This means that a strong score won’t necessarily guarantee that your application will be successful.
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