Scope: This Farming Innovation Programme round funds feasibility studies testing new solutions for on-farm or post-farmgate challenges that boost productivity, resilience, and sustainability while pushing towards low-emission farming, with clear benefits to English farmers, growers or foresters. Projects must fall under one of four subsectors: farmed animals, plants, novel food production systems, or bioeconomy and agroforestry.

Funding: Grant funding request up to £500,000 (up to 70% funded) and last up to 24 months

Closes: 9th September 2026

Scope: This funding targets critical hardware and software development challenges for building universal fault-tolerant quantum computing platforms, requiring projects to identify a specific capability/spec gap, demonstrate feasible performance at scale, and validate innovative technologies against it. It's qubit-modality agnostic (superconducting, trapped ion, neutral atom, photonic, spin, etc.) but must relate to second-generation quantum technologies exploiting superposition or entanglement, and favours a portfolio of diverse projects across technologies, maturity levels, and UK locations. Specific themes include reducing error rates, scalable control/IO architectures, minimising latency in syndrome processing, and modular qubit interconnects, with bonus encouragement for projects showing commercially viable UK manufacturing and co-development with industrial quantum integrators.

Funding: Grant funding request of between £1 million and £3.5 million (up to 70% funded). Projects must last between 24 and 36 months

Closes: 18th September 2026

Scope: The DRIVE35 Innovation Fund supports collaborative R&D projects that design, develop and enable manufacture of technologies driving the UK's transition to zero-emission vehicles and a net-zero automotive industry, with a focus on post-project commercialisation. Projects must fit one of three themes: zero emission vehicle technologies (e.g., batteries, electric drivelines, power electronics, fuel cells, hydrogen storage, plus upstream supply chain and circularity/digitalisation angles), manufacturing competitiveness (digital transformation, decarbonisation, lean manufacturing, supply chain development to boost UK productivity and cost competitiveness), or software-defined vehicles and E/E architectures (embedded software, connectivity, compute platforms, simulation/digital twins, and safe AI use in vehicle software). Innovate UK is again applying a portfolio approach, funding a spread of strands, technologies, organisation sizes, and maturity levels, and will fund both industrial research and experimental development project categories.

Funding: Your project must: have a total grant funding request of between £2.5 million and £20 million be late-stage R&D targeting direct commercialisation at the end of the project be collaborative be a minimum of 50% match funded last between 18 and 36 months

Closes: 16th September 2026

Scope: This is an Expression of Interest for an Innovate UK Innovation Loan, targeting highly innovative, late-stage experimental development projects with a clear route to commercialisation and economic impact, covering activities like prototyping, demonstrating, piloting, testing and validation. Projects must show a compelling innovative idea, a robust business plan, a capable team, risk awareness, sound financials with loan repayment ability, and justification for why other funding isn't viable, while fitting within one of six UK Industrial Strategy sectors (Advanced Manufacturing, Clean Energy, Creative Industries, Digital and Technologies, Defence, or Life Sciences). It particularly encourages applications from underrepresented groups and regions, and funds experimental development only, not earlier-stage research categories.

Funding: If you are successful in this Expression of Interest competition, you will be invited to apply to the full stage competition, where you can apply for a loan of between £100,000 and £5 million to fund your project. Projects can last up to five years, including both the R&D and pre-commercialisation phases.

Closes: 31st December 2026