AI Grant Funding: Supply Chain Demonstrator – UK

Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation, will invest up to £2 million in innovation projects. This funding is from Innovate UK’s BridgeAI programme.

These projects will be to accelerate the development and adoption of artificial intelligence solutions across supply chains of the UK economy. The projects are intended to benefit efficiency in supply chains and improve business decisions at firm level.

The aim of this competition is to develop a product or process that enables data from micro, small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) and large organisations to be shared in a trust less environment. The product or process must enable the development of new artificial intelligence solutions for the benefit of supply chain efficiency and firm level productivity. The output of these projects must be in the form of a demonstrator.

Your project must demonstrate clear monetisation strategies that incentivise data sharing and business models that span benefits across organisations and sectors.

They will fund late R&D projects that will demonstrate benefits for at least two of the three BridgeAI target sectors:

• transport, logistics warehousing
• agriculture, food processing
• construction

Specific Themes

Your project can focus on one or more of the following:

• federated database systems
• data access layers
• novel privacy enhancing technologies and differential privacy systems
• multimodal AI
• data interoperability

Eligible Projects

Your project must:

• have a total grant funding request of between £1.9 million and £2 million
• last between 14 and 16 months
• carry out all of its project work in the UK
• intend to exploit the results from or in the UK
• start by 1 December 2024
• end by 31 March 2026

Who can apply?

• Lead organisation
  • To lead a project your organisation must:
    • be a UK registered business of any size, research and technology organisation (RTO) or not for profit
    • collaborate with other UK registered organisations
    • involve at least two grant claiming micro, small or medium-sized enterprises (SMEs)
    • involve at least two grant claiming large organisations from different BridgeAI target sectors
  • Academic institutions cannot lead or work alone.
• 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.

For more information, visit Innovate UK.