Funding competition

Frontier AI Benchmarking Datasets

UK registered organisations can apply for a share of up to £4.5 million. This programme focuses on the creation, curation, annotation and exploitation of FAIR-data and benchmarks which will fuel AI industry growth. This funding is from Innovate UK.

Competition opens: Tuesday 21 April 2026 Competition closes: Friday 29 May 2026 11:00am

This competition is now closed.

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Competition sections

• Summary
• Eligibility
• Scope
• Dates
• How to apply
• Supporting information

Description

Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), will invest a minimum of £4.5 million on Frontier AI Benchmarking Datasets. This funding is from Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation and is subject to a sufficient number of high quality applications being received. 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. The full dataset should be accompanied with clear plans for further utilisation, including commercial exploitation through licensing or intellectual property, and clear routes for industry access and use, aligned with the following thematic priorities:

AI-Enabled Health and Life Sciences: Making the UK the best place to develop and deploy AI across medicines discovery, development and manufacturing, predictive healthcare applications, and clinical trials. Advanced Materials with AI: Building a world leading AI-first materials R&D capability spanning aerospace, net zero technologies, defence materials, semiconductors.

These will be to create benchmark datasets and evaluation harnesses to enable robust, comparable evaluation of AI models in priority thematic areas and further support training of new AI models. We encourage applications from consortia that bring together data-owning organisations and partners with expertise in data engineering, annotation and benchmarking. Strong applications will clearly demonstrate the value add the benchmarking and datasets will bring to the development and validation of AI and ML models over existing benchmarks and datasets available. Your proposal must deliver all of the following:

• an open benchmark package including benchmark task definition and evaluation protocol; an openly accessible benchmark dataset; complete evaluation harness usable by third parties; documentation and metadata
• a fully curated and annotated full dataset
• details on the Intellectual Property (IP) licence and access route governing the full dataset slice Applications involving data from Theme 1, must demonstrate appropriate data governance and privacy protections. Any released data must be anonymised or de‑identified. In applying to this competition, you are entering into a competitive process. This competition has a funding limit, so we may not be able to fund all the proposed projects. It may be the case that your project scores highly but we are still unable to fund it. Our experience from similar competitions suggests that you could have 10% chance of success. We consider a range of factors when determining whether to provide funding to applicants. This includes an assessment of prior conduct, such as any outstanding payments owed to Innovate UK or UKRI. Such factors may influence the funding decision, potentially resulting in a refusal of funding or an award subject to additional scrutiny. We also reserve the right to adjust funding allocations for any of our competitions. This may be in response to changes in policy, portfolio funding considerations or broader government funding decisions. This competition closes at 11am UK time on the deadline stated in this Innovate UK competition brief. We cannot guarantee other government or third party sites will always show the correct competition information.

Funding type

Grant

Project size

Your project’s total eligible costs must be between £500,000 and £750,000.

Accessibility and Inclusion

We welcome and encourage applications from people of all backgrounds and are committed to making our application process accessible to everyone. This includes making reasonable adjustments, for people who have a disability or a long-term condition and face barriers applying to us. You can contact us at any time to ask for guidance. We recommend you contact us at least 15 working days before this competition’s closing date to allow us to put the most suitable support in place. The support we can provide may be limited if you contact us close to the competition deadline. You can contact Innovate UK by email or call 0300 321 4357. Our phone lines are open from 9am to 12pm and 2pm to 5pm UK time, Monday to Friday (excluding bank holidays).

Who can apply

Your project

• Your project must:
  • have total costs of between £500,000 and £750,000
  • last between 6 and 12 months
  • start by 1 September 2026
  • end by 31 August 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.
• Projects must always start on the first of the month, even if this is a non-working day. You must not start your project until your Grant Offer Letter has been approved by Innovate UK. Any delays within Project Setup may mean we need to delay your project start date.
• You must only include eligible project costs in your application. See our overview of eligible project costs. For specific guidance, see the eligibility section in this competition. Lead organisation
• To lead a collaborative project your organisation must be a UK registered business of any size or RTO. The consortium must contain at least one UK registered micro, small or medium sized enterprise (SME) claiming grant funding on this application.
• More information on the different types of organisation can be found in our Funding rules.
• If the lead organisation is an RTO it must collaborate with two businesses (one SME, and one business of any size).
• Academic institutions cannot lead. Project team
• To collaborate with the lead, your organisation must be one of the following UK registered:
  • business of any size
  • academic institution
  • charity
  • not for profit
  • public sector organisation
  • research and technology organisation (RTO)
• Each partner organisation must be invited into the Innovation Funding Service (IFS) by the lead to collaborate on a project. Once partners have accepted the invitation, they will be asked to login or to create an account in the IFS. They are responsible for entering their own project costs and completing their Project Impact questions in the application.
• To be an eligible collaboration, the lead and at least one other organisation must:
  • apply for funding when entering their costs into the application.
  • include rationale for the collaboration and describe the structure in your application
  • ensure any one partner does not account for more than 70% of the total eligible costs Non-funded partners
• Your project can include UK organisations who do not claim any funding for their work on the project. Their costs will be covered from their own resources. These can include UK, EU and other non-UK organisations. Non-UK partners are permitted to carry out project work from within their home countries and exploit the results outside the UK.
• Where non-funded partners have been invited to the application on IFS, their costs will count towards the total eligible project costs. Subcontractors
• Subcontractors are allowed in this competition.
• Subcontractors can be from anywhere in the UK and you must select them through your usual procurement process.
• You cannot use subcontractors from overseas.
• All subcontractor costs must be justified and appropriate to the total eligible project costs. Subcontracting costs are capped at 20% of the total project costs. An individual project partner is also limited to spending no more than 20% of their own total project costs on subcontracting. Number of applications
• A business or research and technology organisation (RTO) can only lead on one application but can be included as a collaborator in a further two applications.
• If a business is not leading any application, it can collaborate in further two applications.
• If an RTO is not leading any application, it can collaborate in any number of applications.
• An academic institution, charity, not for profit or public sector organisation can collaborate on any number of applications. Sanctions
• This competition will not fund you, or provide any financial benefit to any individual or entities directly or indirectly involved with you, which would expose Innovate UK or any direct or indirect beneficiary of funding from Innovate UK to UK Sanctions. For example, through any procurement, commercial, business development or supply chain activity with any entity as lead, partner or subcontractor related to these countries, administrations and terrorist groups. Use of animals in research and innovation
• Innovate UK expects and supports the provision and safeguarding of welfare standards for animals used in research and innovation, according to best practice and up to date guidance.
• Applicants must ensure that all of the proposed work within projects, both that in the UK and internationally, will comply with the UKRI guidance on the use of animals in research and innovation.
• Any projects selected for funding which involve animals will be asked to provide additional information on welfare and ethical considerations, as well as compliance with any relevant legislation as part of the project start-up process. This information will be reviewed before an award is made.

Previous applications

You cannot use a previously submitted application to apply for this competition. We will not award you funding if you have:

• failed to exploit a previously funded project
• an overdue independent accountant’s report
• failed to comply with grant terms and conditions Innovate UK may withhold a grant payment at any time if you have any outstanding sums due to us in relation to other projects.

Subsidy control (and State aid where applicable)

This competition provides funding to enterprises using the Research, Development and Innovation Streamlined Subsidy Scheme. The Research, Development and Innovation Streamlined Scheme can be viewed on the subsidy database here: SC10780. This is in line with the Subsidy Control Act 2022. Further information about the Subsidy requirements can be found within the Subsidy Control Act 2022 (legislation.gov.uk) Innovate UK is unable to award organisations that are considered to be in financial difficulty. We will conduct financial viability and eligibility tests to confirm this is not the case following the application stage. EU State aid rules now only apply in limited circumstances. See the Windsor Framework to check if these rules apply to your organisation. In the ‘Project details’ section of your application you will be asked questions to indicate if State Aid or Subsidy applies to your organisation. Further Information If you are unsure about your obligations under the Subsidy Control Act 2022 or the State aid rules, you should take independent legal advice. We are unable to advise on individual eligibility or legal obligations. You must not do anything which could cause a breach of Subsidy Control legislation applicable in the United Kingdom. This aims to regulate any advantage granted by a public sector body which threatens to, or distorts competition in the United Kingdom or any other country or countries. This award is classified as a Subsidy which does not form part of your Minimal Financial Assistance or De Minimis allowance.

Funding

A minimum of £4.5 million has been allocated to fund innovation projects in this competition. This is subject to us receiving a sufficient number of high quality applications. Funding will be in the form of a grant. We reserve the right to adjust funding allocations for any of our competitions under exceptional circumstances, for example, in response to changes in policy, portfolio funding considerations, or broader government funding decisions. If your organisation’s work on the project is commercial or economic, your funding request must not exceed the limits below. These limits apply even if your organisation normally acts non-economically but for the purpose of this project will be undertaking commercial or economic activity. For Industrial Research in Research, Development and Innovation Streamlined Subsidy Scheme you can get funding for your eligible project costs of: Category 2 Industrial research projects Funding available for your 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 For more information on company sizes, refer to the company accounts guidance. If you are applying for an award funded under State aid Regulations, the definitions are set out in the European Commission Recommendation of 6 May 2003. Innovate UK may revoke our decision to provide funding without notice if government commitment for this initiative is withdrawn. Research participation The research organisations undertaking non-economic activity as part of the project can share up to 20% of the total eligible project costs. If your consortium contains more than one research organisation undertaking non-economic activity, this maximum is shared between them. 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 organisation, public sector organisation or research organisation
• 80% of full economic costs (FEC) if you are a Je-S registered institution such as an academic Eligibility criteria for claiming 80% of FEC funding

1. Research organisations using the Je-S system must submit their costs through the Je-S system which calculates the 80% FEC figure.
2. On IFS, only the 80% FEC output should be entered at 100% funding.
3. Applicants do not need to show the remaining 20% on the finance table. To find out more see our: Cost Guidance for Academics.

Your proposal

Text update 20 April 2026: additional information added to Scope requirements. 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. Your project 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 your project must sufficiently describe:
• serviceable market and customers
• specific added value through curation, annotation and provision of dataset and benchmark
• how your dataset will unlock development and validation of Frontier AI technologies Your proposal must align to one of the outlined themes and deliver all of the following:
• an open benchmark package, including benchmark task definition, an evaluation protocol, an openly accessible benchmark dataset, a complete evaluation harness usable by third parties, and documentation and metadata
• a fully curated and annotated full dataset
• details on the Intellectual Property (IP) licence and access route governing the full dataset slice Applications involving data from Theme 1, must demonstrate appropriate data governance and privacy protections. Any released data must be anonymised or de‑identified. Portfolio approach We want to fund a variety of projects across different technologies, organisation types, markets, technological maturities and themes. We call this a portfolio approach.

Specific themes

Your project 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. You 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. You 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

Research categories

We will fund industrial research projects, as defined in the guidance on categories of research.

Projects we will not fund

We are not funding projects that:

• do not sufficiently provide a quantified serviceable addressable market
• do not sufficiently provide clear background IP ownership or rights
• do not sufficiently provide a specific defensibility route
• do not align with the competition theme and specific priority areas
• do not sufficiently provide a named baseline with metrics and numeric targets for validation
• do not sufficiently address the scope of the competition
• are primarily literature review studies, requirement gathering, without substantive experimental R&D
• propose routine integration, deployment, orchestration or productisation of existing AI tools or third-party models without novel AI or ML development
• are not delivering measurable and specific objectives
• are primarily routine integration or deployment of existing AI tools without substantive technical innovation
• don’t have clear technical novelty and feasibility challenge
• do not result in defensible foreground IP
• focus primarily on‑non AI, ML R&D and development (cross‑cutting projects)
• develop fully autonomous targeting
• have the primary purpose of developing hardware, including sensor hardware, quantum hardware, platforms or other enabling infrastructure, where AI is only a secondary feature, add‑on analytics layer or downstream application We cannot fund projects that are:
• dependent on export performance, for example, giving a subsidy to a baker on the condition that it exports a certain quantity of bread to another country
• dependent on domestic inputs usage, for example, giving a subsidy to a baker on the condition that it uses 50% UK flour in their product

Timeline (description list)

• 21 April 2026: Competition opens
• 28 April 2026: Online briefing event: watch the recording (Briefing slides are available to download from Supporting Information)
• 29 May 2026 11:00am: Competition closes
• 30 June 2026 11:13am: Applicants notified
• 1 September 2026: Project start from

Before you start

You must read the guidance on applying for a competition on the Innovation Funding Service before you start. Before submitting, it is the lead applicant’s responsibility to make sure:

• that all the information provided in the application is correct
• your proposal meets the eligibility and scope criteria
• all sections of the application are marked as complete
• that all partners have completed all assigned sections and accepted the terms and conditions (T&Cs) You can reopen your application once submitted, up until the competition deadline. You must resubmit the application before the competition deadline. What we ask you The application is split into four sections:

1. Project details.
2. Application questions.
3. Finances.
4. Project Impact. Accessibility and Inclusion We welcome and encourage applications from people of all backgrounds and are committed to making our application process accessible to everyone. This includes making reasonable adjustments, for people who have a disability or a long-term condition and face barriers applying to us. You can contact us at any time to ask for guidance. We recommend you contact us at least 15 working days before this competition’s closing date to allow us to put the most suitable support in place. The support we can provide may be limited if you contact us close to the competition deadline. You can contact Innovate UK by email or call 0300 321 4357. Our phone lines are open from 9am to 12pm and 2pm to 5pm UK time, Monday to Friday (excluding bank holidays).

1. Project details

This section provides background for your application and is not scored. Do not include any website addresses (URLs) in your answers. Application team Decide which organisations will work with you on your project and invite people from those organisations to help complete the application. Application details Give your project’s title, start date and duration. Research category Select the type of research you will undertake. Project summary Describe your project briefly and be clear about what makes it innovative. We use this section to assign the right experts to assess your application. Your answer can be up to 400 words long. Public description Describe your project in detail and in a way that you are happy to see published. Do not include any commercially sensitive information. If we award your project funding, we will publish this description. This can happen before you start your project. Your answer can be up to 400 words long. Scope Describe how your project fits the scope of the competition. Your answer must sufficiently explain:

• serviceable market and customers
• specific added value through curation, annotation and provision of dataset and benchmark
• how your dataset will unlock development and validation of Frontier AI technologies If your answer is not sufficiently detailed or your project is not in scope, it will not be sent for assessment. We will tell you the reason why. Your answer can be up to 800 words long.

2. Application questions

The assessors will score all your answers apart from questions 1 to 7. You will receive feedback for each scored question. Find out more about how our assessors assess and how we select applications for funding. You must answer all questions. You must not include any website addresses or links (URLs) in your answers. If you do, your application will be made ineligible. Question 1. Themes (not scored) Select one main theme from the specific themes list in the ‘Scope’ section of this competition. You cannot choose more than one.

• Theme 1 AI-Enabled Health and Life Sciences
• Theme 2 Advanced Materials with AI Question 2. Applicant location (not scored) You must state the name and full registered address of your organisation and any partners or subcontractors working on your project. We are collecting this information to understand more about the geographical location of all applicants. Question 3. Animal testing (not scored) Will your project involve any trials with animals or animal testing? You must select one option:
• Yes
• No We will only support innovation projects conducted to the highest standards of animal welfare. Further information for proposals involving animal testing is available at the UKRI Good Research Hub and NC3R’s animal welfare guidance. Question 4. Permits and licences (not scored) Will you have the correct permits and licences in place to carry out your project? We are unable to fund projects which do not have the correct permits or licences in place by your project star