Advanced Research and Invention Agency
ARIA
A government-backed agency modelled on DARPA, funding high-risk, high-reward research through programme directors who set their own opportunity spaces. Deliberately lighter-touch than conventional peer review, with a tolerance for failure written into its statute.
- Kind of funder
- Government body
- Where it funds
- UK-wide
- Indicative award size
- £100k – £20m
- Approx. annual research spend
- £200m
- Who can apply
- Universities, Research institutes, SMEs, Large businesses, Individual researchers
- Career stages
- Any stage
Programme-driven — opportunities appear and close on programme directors’ timetables.
Research areas
Named schemes (4)
Hypersensory Intelligence – Olfactory Perception: TA1 Full proposals ↗
This £65m programme seeks to build the foundations for general-purpose olfactory perception – matching or exceeding biological systems in programme challenges. We’re accepting proposals for Technical Area 1, in which up to six teams will be given up to £500k each to build the Open Olfactory Resource (OOR), the world's largest open, cross-domain dataset of volatile chemical signals.
Open30 Sept 2026pulled from ARIA 2026-09-11Safeguarded AI: Cybersecurity – Rolling applications ↗
This £20m funding call seeks to test and accelerate the hypothesis that AI-enabled formal methods can make high-assurance cyber defence practical at scale. We're accepting proposals on a rolling basis, reviewed in quarterly batches, for Blue Teams (3–6 teams, approx. £2.5–3.5m each) to build production-grade, security-critical software components whose key security properties are backed by machine-checked proofs – validated through coordinated red-team exercises.
Open31 Oct 2026pulled from ARIA 2026-09-11Scaling Trust: Tracks 2+3 – Rolling applications ↗
This £49.8m programme seeks to build tools for agents to securely interact with one another in untrusted environments while respecting the preferences of their users. We're accepting proposals on a rolling basis, reviewed in quarterly batches, across two tracks: Track 2 – Tooling (4–6 teams, £200k–£2m each) to build open-source agents and reusable components for secure requirement capture, negotiation, protocol generation, and verification; and Track 3 – Fundamental Research (three Research Centres plus 4–12 smaller teams, £100k–£3m each) to turn empirical security into provable guarantees and unlock new cyber-physical trust primitives for agents.
Open31 Oct 2026pulled from ARIA 2026-09-11ARIA programme calls ↗
Each ARIA programme director opens funding calls within their opportunity space on their own timetable. Check the site directly — programmes appear and close without a fixed annual cycle.
Rolling / recurringCheck funder site for current round£100k – £20m per awardchecked 2026-05-01