ARIA Scaling Trust grants

ARIA Scaling Trust funds tools that help AI agents coordinate securely. The funding page says applications for Track 2 and Track 3 are open and are reviewed in quarterly batches. The next proposal cutoff is 31 October 2026 at 14:00 GMT. The call for proposals, version 2.0 dated 4 September 2026, sets the grant size from £100,000 to £3,000,000. The programme budget is £49.8 million.

Track 2 funds open source agents and reusable components for requirement capture, negotiation, security reasoning, and verifiable reporting. Track 3 funds foundational research, including three research centres meant to anchor the work in the UK. The call expects 4 to 6 teams on Track 2, and 3 research centres plus 4 to 12 teams on Track 3. A project can run from 3 to 18 months.

ARIA welcomes individuals, universities, research institutions, companies of any size, charities, and public sector research organisations. Its main focus is people and organisations based in the UK. It can fund an organisation outside the UK when the work increases the programme's impact in the UK and the proposal sets out that plan. Software produced under Track 2 and Track 3 must be dual licensed under the MIT licence and Apache 2.0. ARIA funds 100 percent of project costs.

Apply on the ARIA grant platform. This cycle opened on 4 September 2026. Review runs through November 2026, and applicants are notified on 30 November 2026. A proposal sent after the cutoff is reviewed in the next cycle. ARIA says it expects to fund a small number of projects and may make no awards in a given cycle. It may also change the cutoff, pause the call, or close it early.