Trust Everything, Everywhere
Trust 'building blocks', like encryption, enable digital industries to flourish securely, but they don't extend into the physical world. With emerging technology blurring the line between digital and physical, a new trust infrastructure that straddles both worlds could unlock cyber-physical markets.
Programme development
Within opportunity spaces, we build multi-year R&D programmes designed to advance complex, large-scale ideas that require coordinated investment and management across disciplines and institutions.
Read the programme thesis below for our current thinking and discover some of the ways we've shaped our programme direction. Subject to approval, this programme is expected to launch in February 2026.
Read the programme thesis: Scaling Trust
- AI is collapsing coordination costs, signalling a new era for our society and our economy.
- As opposed to an all-powerful, all-knowing AI, we envision this era as one of many AI agents, each acting as our faithful representatives, able to go out into both digital and physical worlds and mobilise, negotiate, and verify on our behalf.
- Security primitives, like programmable cryptography and secure hardware, represent an opportunity to realise this vision by creating scalable, cyber-physical trust infrastructure for agents and enabling previously impossible forms of secure interactions.
- This programme proposes three core efforts: advancing fundamental research into agentic coordination; building open-source tools to make this capability robust and available to all; and setting up a series of challenges that will test AI systems’ capabilities in adversarial environments, with multi-million pound prize funds for the best teams.
Read the programme thesis
Resources
Read the programme thesis (accessible version)
Share your thoughts
Shaping our programme direction
Discovery workshop sessions
On 13-14 October, we held a workshop that brought together experts from a range of fields to help shape the direction of a programme in this space through feedback, critique, collaboration and knowledge sharing. Catch up on the various speaker sessions by watching the recordings below.
Pre-programme discovery funding (closed)
To help inform our programme direction and build community, we put out a call to fund ~3-month exploratory projects with up to £20,000 each. Once selected, the funded projects will be visible here.
We welcomed proposals that fell into one of these four tracks:
- Track 1: Systemisation of knowledge – In-depth analyses of topics relevant to the opportunity space.
- Track 2: Applied agentic challenges – Design and prototype implementation of games to help us measure the current state of the art in multi-agent coordination and surface new agentic capabilities.
- Track 3: Ethical and risk analysis – Analyses of ethical considerations and risks we should be mindful of as we consider funding tools and infrastructure for multi-agent coordination.
- Track 4: Community building in the UK, and beyond – Events, educational content, website and other such community-driven efforts to grow multi-disciplinary R&D communities in the UK and beyond who are relevant to the opportunity space.
More details including what was in and out of scope can be found in the call for proposals below.
Funding resources
Meet the programme team
Our Programme Directors are supported by a core team that provides a blend of operational coordination and highly specialised technical expertise.
Alex Obadia
Programme Director
Alex is an entrepreneur and investor in early-stage frontier technologies, with a keen interest for quantum cryptography. Previously, he co-founded Flashbots, a software unicorn dedicated to safeguarding the decentralisation and permissionlessness of the Ethereum blockchain. Flashbots’ products have helped generate nearly £2bn so far and its R&D sparked the 'MEV' industry.
Sarath Murugan
Programme Specialist
Sarath joined ARIA from a business operations and strategy role in a defence engineering scale-up, where his team developed a product that brought the capabilities of gen-AI to the disconnected-edge. He holds an LLB from Bristol, and has experience in project and product-facing roles. Sarath supports ARIA as an operating partner from Pace.
Nicola Greco
External Technical Advisor
Nicola is a cryptography researcher and investor. Over the last decade, he has led Protocol Labs’ Cryptography R&D team who pioneered the use of zero-knowledge cryptography in production systems, and was the first check in multiple unicorns. Formerly, he was a fellow at the Harvard Center for Internet and Society and a PhD student at MIT advised by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web.
Edith-Clare Hall
Frontier Specialist
Edith works alongside the Programme Directors to scope out emerging areas of technology that can shape current and future ARIA programmes. Her doctoral work is in Soft Robotics and Engineering Mathematics at the University of Bristol, where she has developed bespoke wearable robots for progressive disease, leveraging novel hardware and AI.
Find us at the following event
Join our team
We are hiring a Technical Specialist - Cyber-Physical Multi-Agent Systems to help shape and deliver a bold programme of research in this space.
Sign up for updates
Stay up-to-date on our opportunity spaces and programmes, be the first to know about our funding calls and get the latest news from ARIA.