Funding opportunities
Discover our open funding calls and look back on past ones.
Our research model
At the heart of our approach are our Programme Directors, who retain creative control over how and who they fund within the opportunity spaces they've defined. Our research model is built around two primary modes:
Programmes (£50–80M):
Our programmes are designed to advance complex, large-scale ideas which require coordinated investment and management across disciplines and institutions. To build a programme, each Programme Director directs the review, selection, and funding of a portfolio of projects which work in tandem to drive breakthroughs.
Opportunity seeds (up to £500k):
With smaller budgets and less structure than programmes, seeds support individual research teams to uncover new pathways that could inspire future programmes or might justify additional support as a standalone project.
Funding opportunities
View our live funding opportunities:Opportunity Seed
Opportunity seeds: Programmable Plants
The Programmable Plants opportunity space asks if we can programme plants to remove more CO2, improve food security, and deliver medicines to those in need. This seed funding call is looking to fund projects to challenge assumptions, open up new research paths, and provide steps towards new capabilities within the space, with up to £500k each.
Application Date
09 April 2025
Opportunity space
Programmable Plants
Programme Director
Angie Burnett
Programme Funding
Safeguarded AI: Technical Areas 1.2 + 1.3
Backed by £14.2m, we’re looking to fund teams of software developers to build the scaffolding needed for the success of the Safeguarded AI programme. For Technical Area 1.2, we are looking for Creators to develop the computational implementation of the theoretical frameworks being developed as part of TA 1.1 (the 'Theory'). The teams will work collaboratively and simultaneously on different elements of the same overall problem. What we’re looking for is track record, ways of thinking, and potentially ideas about prototypes that seem useful or relevant. The “project plan” would consist mostly of the availability of human resources. We’re not looking for proposals to lay out anything like a full technical design to satisfy a set of requirements that doesn’t exist yet. For TA 1.3, Creators will work on the 'Human-Computer Interfaces' that facilitate interaction between diverse human users and the systems being built in TA 1.2 and TA 2 (‘Machine Learning’). These technical areas are integral to supporting the programme’s wider ambition on demonstrating the viability of a new, alternative pathway for research and development toward safe and transformative AI.
Application Date
09 April 2025
Opportunity space
Mathematics for Safe AI
Programme Director
David 'davidad' Dalrymple
Programme Funding
Safeguarded AI TA2 (Phase 1)
ARIA is launching a multi-phased solicitation for Technical Area 2 (TA2) to support the development of a general-purpose Safeguarded AI workflow. The programme aims to demonstrate that frontier AI techniques can be harnessed to create AI systems with verifiable safety guarantees. In TA2, we will award £18m to a non-profit entity to develop critical machine learning capabilities, requiring strong organizational governance and security standards. Phase 1, backed by £1M, will fund up to 5 teams to spend 3.5 months to develop full Phase 2 proposals. Phase 2 — which will open on 25 June 2025 —will fund a single group, for £18M, to deliver the research agenda. TA2 will explore leveraging securely-boxed AI to train autonomous control systems that can be verified against mathematical models, improving performance and robustness. The workflow will involve forking and fine-tuning mainstream pre-trained frontier AI models to create verifiably safeguarded AI solutions.
Application Date
30 April 2025
Opportunity Space
Mathematics for Safe AI
Programme Director
David 'davidad' Dalrymple