Innovate UK Smart Grants
Innovate UK·United Kingdom
Innovate UK's open-topic grant for UK-registered companies with a genuinely new product, service or process; paused since January 2025 with no round announced for 2025/26.
What you get
“Innovate UK Smart grants: July 2024 round: total eligible project costs of £100,000 to £500,000 for 6 to 18 month projects, or £100,000 to £1 million for 19 to 24 month collaborative projects. Grant covers a percentage of eligible costs: for feasibility and industrial research, up to 70% for micro or small enterprises, up to 60% for medium, up to 50% for large; for experimental development, up to 45%, 35% and 25% respectively.”
Can you apply
You must also meet these Smart Grants criteria before applying: all applicants must be UK-registered companies and carry out their project activities in the UK; the project must include at least one small or medium-sized enterprise; the innovation should be completely new and ahead of anything similar on the market; you must be able to demonstrate a clear and sizeable market need; you must provide a robust and deliverable plan for quick and successful commercialisation.
When
Not open right now, and no next round has been announced.
Past rounds
- Innovate UK Smart grants: July 2024closed 13 Nov 2024
What Innovate UK funds
Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation, funds UK-registered businesses to bring high-impact innovations to market through competitive, time-boxed grant competitions, including a recent series of frontier AI and sovereign AI competitions run with DSIT.
Everything Innovate UK funds →Details
Smart Grants were run as quarterly, open-to-all-sectors competitions on the Innovation Funding Service. UKRI guidance (last updated 20 February 2026) still carries the pause notice: "From January 2025, Innovate UK is pausing Smart Grants to develop tailored support, with a new pilot launching in spring 2025 to help startups tackle innovation, sustainability and scaling." The amounts recorded here are the project cost bands published for the last round, Innovate UK Smart grants: July 2024; Innovate UK funds a percentage of eligible project costs (up to 70% for micro and small organisations on feasibility and industrial research), not the full project cost.