Activation Partners

For ARIA, the success of our partnerships goes beyond the outcomes of individual work streams, and includes both building a well-connected ecosystem and the integration of our partners into ARIA’s spaces. A key learning for us has been the value of feedback loops and collaboration.

Mirroring our approach to coordinating the R&D we fund, every quarter our partners check in with us to discuss what’s working, learnings, next steps, and where ARIA can support.

We also organise regular collaboration sessions for partners to brainstorm their upcoming plans and ways of working together. Our partners also interact closely with the wider ARIA network at programme workshops and at events like the inaugural ARIA Summit in spring 2025, where we hosted an ‘Activation Partner Day’ for ARIA-funded researchers to attend masterclasses from our partners.

We are allocating £100m to recruit a maximum of 8-10 new Activation Partners to design and run bespoke activities across our opportunity spaces to accelerate the pace, probability, and translation of breakthroughs.

Funding will be allocated across partners based on the scale and ambition of their activities and we expect partners to receive different amounts accordingly.

We’re not setting strict definitions on the types of organisations we’ll work with (and anticipate we’ll end up partnering with organisations which look quite different from one another).

The most significant expansion from our first cohort is our explicit focus on the application of advanced AI capabilities for scientific discovery and research. We’re actively seeking partners who can bring capabilities such as, but not limited to, frontier AI for Science tools, AI Scientist systems, autonomous labs, or AI-focused talent programmes into ARIA’s opportunity spaces.

This doesn’t mean every partner needs an AI focus – we’re still looking for world-class translators of frontier R&D across the across – but it does mean we’re opening the door to a new category of partner that wasn’t a primary focus in the first cohort. 

Partners should have strong track records translating frontier R&D into real-world impact, or developing/deploying advanced AI capabilities for research acceleration.

Activities must have UK focus and be undertaken in the UK, but applicants don't need to be UK-based. We're looking for organisations that can collaborate closely with ARIA's programme directors and funded Creators.

Examples could include: entrepreneurial science or AI for Science talent fellowships, supporting Creators with frontier AI models, accelerating projects with AI Scientists, venture creation programmes, establishing moonshot R&D arms, building talent pipelines, or innovation incentives like AI for Science prizes.

We'll work closely with selected partners to refine and evolve activities over the three-year period, with regular check-ins and collaborative sessions built into the model. 

We believe that advanced AI techniques applied to science, both for AI for Science models used by researchers and AI Scientists that can run the full research process with minimal intervention will allow us to explore far more research directions than humans alone.

This could lead to a massive increase in the speed and scale of societally important breakthroughs.

We’re therefore expanding the scope of our Activation Partners initiative to bring these capabilities, and the facilities to support them, into our opportunity spaces and the wider UK ecosystem.

This isn't about replacing researchers — it's about raising their ambition and reach. Giving them access to frontier AI capabilities compounds what they can achieve, and our Activation Partners are the mechanism for making that access real. Amodo Design, from our first cohort of Activation Partners, is an example of where we’ve increased the ambition and reach of our Creators by providing access to expertise and tools –  this is what we want to emulate with AI capabilities.