Innovate UK Grants 2026: What's Open After Smart

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Smart Grants Are Closed: What That Means in 2026

Smart grants were Innovate UK's best-known open competition: any UK business with a strong idea in any sector could apply. That door has shut. UKRI's guidance for specific funds (opens in a new tab) says Smart grants are now closed for new applications as funding is being aligned to Innovate UK's new strategic direction. The last two Smart rounds in Innovate UK's data are April 2024 and November 2024.

Smart was big. According to the Smart grants impact evaluation report published by UKRI in July 2026, £531 million was committed to 1,688 projects between 2019/20 and 2024/25. The same report says 51% of the funded firms were micro businesses with fewer than 10 employees, 22% had no revenue yet, and 61% of projects were at or below proof of concept (technology readiness level 3).

In the final rounds, Grantsights analysis of the funded-projects spreadsheet counts 327 projects worth £109.2 million in the 2023/24 and 2024/25 Smart competitions. The median project got £336,804, the middle half got between £274,781 and £348,845, and the largest got £1.23 million.

What replaces it. Nothing open to every sector, for now. UKRI's Velocity page, linked from its Innovate UK funding, assessment and award management page (opens in a new tab) and updated October 26, 2026, says Velocity will launch in autumn 2027 and that all Innovate UK support will be offered through it from then on. Instead of grants for one-off projects, accepted businesses will get a package of funding, expert insight, growth coaching, networks, investor connections and international opportunities through one application. It's limited to six Industrial Strategy areas:

Our honest read: if your business sits outside those six areas, Innovate UK will get harder to use, not easier. If it sits inside them, the next year is a transition, and UKRI says businesses "may start to see changes" in how it finds and engages companies before Velocity opens.

What's Open on October 29, 2026

UKRI's funding finder listed 30 Innovate UK opportunities as open or upcoming on October 29, 2026. Almost all are tied to a sector, a technology or a partner country. Here's a cross-section, with amounts and dates as shown on each UKRI listing:

To see every live competition, search the Innovation Funding Service (opens in a new tab), which is linked from GOV.UK's Apply for innovation funding (opens in a new tab) page. Briefs open and close every few weeks, so a list like this goes stale fast. That's the strongest argument for signing up to Innovate UK's alerts rather than checking once.

What 5,376 Business Awards Show

Grantsights analysis of Innovate UK's funded-projects spreadsheet found 5,376 awards to businesses in competitions from 2024/25 and 2025/26, worth £1.248 billion. The headline is that a typical award is small and a few huge awards take most of the money.

Data: Innovate UK, "Innovate UK funded projects from financial year 2016 to 2017 to present" (updated October 12, 2026), downloaded October 29, 2026. Competition years 2024/25 and 2025/26. Each row is one business's share of one project, so a business in two projects counts twice.

Award sizes cluster at the bottom:

Just 168 awards of £1 million or more took 44% of the £1.248 billion. Rolls-Royce plc alone had 16 awards worth £135.8 million, mostly through the Aerospace Technology Institute programme. That's why the East Midlands tops the regional table by value even though London had almost three times as many awards.

Take Rolls-Royce out and the East Midlands drops to 328 awards worth £59.8 million. The address is the business's registered region, which isn't always where the work happens.

Where small businesses actually won. The competitions with the most business awards were small-ticket ones. Creative Catalyst 2024 made 299 business awards with a median of £49,688. Growth Catalyst Early Stage: New Innovators made 193 with a median of £49,857. The Women in Innovation Award 2024/25 made 50 with a median of £74,938. At the larger end, Growth Catalyst Investor Partnerships Round 2 made 142 business awards with a median of £417,922, paired with private investment.

Some named examples from the published data: for example, Riboscope received £49,991 (Riboscope Ltd, Cambridge) from Growth Catalyst Early Stage: New Innovators for AI-powered discovery of structured RNAs. SilviBio Limited in West Lothian received £74,999 from the Women in Innovation Award 2024/25 for peat-free propagation blocks. In the November 2024 Smart round, Eutechtics Limited in York was offered £172,932 against total project costs of £247,046, which is the 70% small-business rate at work.

Limits of this data. It lists offers made, not applications refused. Innovate UK says the dataset is hard to analyse without knowing its many funding mechanisms, and some rows are a business's share of a larger collaborative project. Projects from late 2026 may not appear yet.

How Much of Your Costs Innovate UK Pays

The rate is set in each competition brief, so check yours. The pattern in current briefs is consistent, and the BridgeAI Deployment Catalyst brief (opens in a new tab) on the Innovation Funding Service is a clear example:

So a small business with a £300,000 project would get up to £210,000 and must find £90,000 itself. A common mistake is writing a budget around the grant and forgetting the match. In BridgeAI, research organisations doing non-economic work can share no more than 30% of total project costs between them.

Innovate UK's costs guidance for non-academic organisations (opens in a new tab), last updated October 22, 2026, sets out the rules that trip people up:

• Business size is group size. You certify size using the company accounts guidance on GOV.UK (opens in a new tab), and if you're part of a group, the whole group's figures count.
• Overheads. You can claim none, a flat 20% of labour costs (the quickest to approve), or a calculated figure that Innovate UK's Funding Assurance team reviews.
• Founders without PAYE. Micro companies, sole traders and partnerships not running PAYE can claim their own time at £22 an hour, up to 8 hours a day and 40 hours a week, backed by timesheets.
• Patent costs. SMEs can claim up to £7,500 per partner towards filing new IP from the project. It can't be moved to other costs.
• VAT. Grants are outside the scope of VAT. If you're VAT registered, claim costs net of VAT.

Under the subsidy scheme BridgeAI uses, no more than £3 million can be awarded as a grant to one business in one competition.

Who Can Apply

There's no single eligibility rule for Innovate UK grants. Each competition sets its own, and the brief is the only place that counts. Across the 30 live opportunities, though, 4 patterns repeat:

1. You need to be UK registered. Almost every listing starts with "UK registered businesses" or "UK registered SMEs". Individuals with an idea and no company can't apply; our start-up grants UK guide covers what's realistic before you incorporate.
2. Many competitions are collaborative only. BridgeAI requires an AI SME to lead with one UK medium or large "deployer", and allows two or three organisations in total. The lead must carry 40% to 70% of costs and the deployer 30% to 50%. Academic institutions can't lead.
3. Bilateral rounds need a foreign partner. The Germany and Singapore rounds require a partner from that country.
4. Some are for knowledge bases, not businesses. Knowledge Transfer Partnerships are applied for by a university, RTO or Catapult working with a business. UKRI's KTP guidance (opens in a new tab) says a graduate "KTP Associate" is placed in the business for 12 to 36 months, and around 800 businesses take part at any time.

Innovate UK also checks your history. BridgeAI's brief says you can be ruled out for failing to exploit a previously funded project or for an overdue independent accountant's report, and that Innovate UK can't fund organisations in financial difficulty. It runs financial viability tests after the application stage.

Innovation Loans: The One Option With No Deadline

If you're an SME close to market, the Innovation Loans Expression of Interest (opens in a new tab) is open with no closing date. It's a loan, not a grant, and the terms are set out in the brief:

Read GOV.UK's innovation loans guidance (opens in a new tab) first. You have to show you can afford interest and repay on time, so a pre-revenue company with no clear path to sales is a poor fit. The brief also tells applicants to take expert advice before borrowing.

How Decisions Are Made and How Long They Take

According to UKRI's page on what happens after you apply (opens in a new tab), independent assessors score each question and a "panel sheet" ranks every application by average score. The highest ranked are recommended for funding, subject to a minimum quality threshold and any "portfolio approach". Under that approach, a proposal scoring lower than yours can win if it fills a gap in the competition's spread of projects.

The BridgeAI brief says three independent assessors will review each application. Some competitions add an interview, and the interview score replaces the written score unless the brief says otherwise. Decisions are final, with no right of appeal, and assessor feedback isn't provided for every competition.

Timelines from a live brief:

Plan for about two months from deadline to decision, and four months to a funded start. If you need cash before then, Innovate UK isn't your bridge.

What Innovate UK Doesn't Tell You

The odds are long, and good applications lose. Innovate UK doesn't print a success rate on competition pages. The best public evidence is the technical annex to the Smart grants evaluation: in its matched sample of 21,782 applications from February 2019 to April 2024, 1,295 were successful and 20,487 were declined, about 6% funded. It also counted 6,427 declined applications that scored above 70 and 1,439 that scored 80 or higher. A strong score is necessary, not enough.

The median award is £50,000, not £500,000. Headlines about £25 million competitions describe the pot, not your share. Grantsights analysis found 44% of business awards were under £50,000, and the 168 awards of £1 million or more took 44% of the money. If your plan depends on a seven-figure grant, you're competing with Rolls-Royce and Airbus for it.

The data shows offers, not money paid. Innovate UK's dataset notes awards are subject to grant offer and conditions being met. According to the costs guidance, grant claims must be backed by actual costs, with timesheets or project records for staff time. Underestimate your cash flow and a winning project can still strain the business.

Applying to the wrong strand is fatal. BridgeAI's brief says an application in the wrong strand is ineligible and won't be assessed, and an SME can lead only one application across its three strands. Red flag: if you can't say in one sentence which strand you fit, email the competition team (the brief asks for this at least 10 working days before close).

The rules are moving. Smart's closure and Velocity's 2027 launch mean the routes in this guide may change within months. UKRI says new approaches are being introduced progressively before Velocity opens.

Common Mistakes That Sink Applications

These come from Innovate UK's own published rules rather than guesswork:

• Treating Innovate UK as start-up money. A business with no product, no team and no match funding fails because it can't meet the brief's readiness bar. BridgeAI, for example, wants a working minimum viable product at technology readiness level 5 to 6.
• Getting company size wrong. Size is assessed for the whole group, and the funding rate follows from it. A small subsidiary of a large group isn't a small business here.
• Ignoring the scope. Briefs name sectors, technologies and deployers. An excellent project outside scope scores poorly or is ruled ineligible.
• Leaving it late. The Innovation Funding Service lets you reopen and resubmit until the deadline, but not after. Partners must all mark their sections complete and accept the terms before you submit.
• Skipping the feedback. Where feedback exists, it sits on your Innovation Funding Service dashboard. If you're eligible to resubmit elsewhere, it's the only direct guidance you'll get.

When Innovate UK Is the Wrong Fit

Innovate UK funds technical R&D with a commercial route. Plenty of businesses and organisations will do better elsewhere:

• New businesses without R&D: our start-up grants UK guide covers the Start Up Loan and the small number of real grants for new firms.
• Social enterprises: our grants for community interest companies guide lists funders that accept CICs.
• Charities and community groups: Innovate UK isn't a charity funder. Start with our charity grants UK overview, community grants UK guide or National Lottery Awards for All guide.
• Companies already spending on R&D: HMRC's R&D relief guidance on GOV.UK (opens in a new tab) explains the separate tax relief. It isn't a grant and has its own rules.

Our verdict: apply when a live brief matches your sector and stage almost word for word, you can fund 30% or more yourself, and you can wait four months for cash. Otherwise, the hours are better spent on customers or investors.

Sources Checked

All sources were read or downloaded on October 29, 2026:

• UKRI, Innovate UK (opens in a new tab) home page and guidance for applicants (opens in a new tab)
• UKRI, guidance for applying to specific funds (opens in a new tab) (Smart grants closure notice)
• UKRI, Velocity page (reached from Innovate UK funding, assessment and award management (opens in a new tab)), last updated October 26, 2026
• UKRI, Smart Grants impact evaluation final report (opens in a new tab) and technical annex, published July 14, 2026
• UKRI, Innovate UK general guidance (opens in a new tab), costs guidance for non-academic organisations (opens in a new tab) and what happens after you submit (opens in a new tab)
• UKRI, funding finder filtered to open and upcoming Innovate UK opportunities (opens in a new tab)
• Innovation Funding Service, BridgeAI Deployment Catalyst: AI for operational systems (opens in a new tab) and Innovation Loans Expression of Interest (opens in a new tab)
• UKRI, Innovate UK funded projects since 2004 (opens in a new tab): "funded projects from financial year 2016 to 2017 to present" spreadsheet, updated October 12, 2026
• GOV.UK, Apply for innovation funding (opens in a new tab), innovation loans guidance (opens in a new tab) and company accounts guidance on size (opens in a new tab)