Activation Partners
Empowering talent and supporting new ventures across our opportunity spaces
ARIA’s mission is to unlock scientific and technological breakthroughs that benefit everyone.
To fulfil this mission, we must ensure those breakthroughs translate into widespread impact – it’s why we’re baking science entrepreneurship into all that we do, from the entrepreneurial drive of our Programme Directors to our founder-friendly funding terms.
Our founding cohort of Activation Partners are working alongside us to further embed science entrepreneurship across our work, helping spark latent ideas, empower talent, support new ventures and provide insights and connectivity across the opportunity spaces we’re exploring* – and the new ones we have yet to shape.
Meet our Activation Partners
Made up of nine deeply technical and highly entrepreneurial organisations, our Activation Partners are pioneers of new science innovation models, community builders, world-leading research labs, and deep-tech focused accelerators. Together, they will create new scientific talent pipelines, foster novel IP, and facilitate more investments within the UK R&D ecosystem to ensure the breakthrough R&D we fund has a seamless route to societal impact.
Some of them were already established players in the UK, while others have set up operations and built teams here for the first time.
Amodo
Amodo Design is an engineering consultancy covering the entire engineering stack. Amodo is working with ARIA's Programme Directors and Creators to develop new scientific research equipment and prototypes from inventions in our opportunity spaces. Our partnership aims to enable new discoveries and then to de-bottleneck the process of turning discoveries into real-world impact by speeding up the journey from discovery to product, enhancing early-stage traction. The goal is that no R&D Creator is ever blocked by a lack of access to hardware.
> Dive into Amodo's work for ARIA
Cambridge University Health Partners (CUHP)
Cambridge University Health Partners (CUHP) is bringing together leaders from science, health and business organisations (Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust, University of Cambridge (including the Maxwell Centre and the Milner Therapeutics Institute), Cambridge Network, Cambridge Neuroscience, Vellos, and Babraham Research Campus) to make the Cambridge NeuroWorks consortium which is supporting ARIA's Scalable Neural Interfaces opportunity space. CUHP is launching programmes designed to accelerate innovation in neurotechnology by enabling scientists, clinicians and entrepreneurs to collaborate and translate speculative science into practical applications at scale, while fostering a vibrant UK-wide neurotech community.
> Learn more about Cambridge NeuroWorks and get involved
CIC and Venture Café Global Institute
CIC / Venture Café Global Institute are bringing their global innovation community to the UK in partnership with ARIA. Our UK hubs will energise and connect the nation’s technology ecosystem, bringing together innovators, entrepreneurs and small businesses through free, high-impact weekly gatherings and programming. Following the launch of Venture Café London in May 2025, two additional UK cities will also be added creating a powerful network that opens new opportunities for collaboration between top tech talent in the UK and globally. Open to all innovators, our mission is to connect talent in ARIA’s current and emerging opportunity spaces to the wider innovation ecosystem to advance progress and ensure scalable impact.
> Learn more about Venture Café's move to the UK
Convergent Research
Convergent Research are identifying and developing Focused Research Organisation (FRO)-shaped opportunities in our opportunity spaces. FROs are a new scientific institutional model designed to make fast progress by using team science and systems engineering to tackle research bottlenecks. Working closely with ARIA Programme Directors and the broader UK research ecosystem, Convergent Research is running a FRO Founder Residency to train a cohort of promising founders in refining their FRO concepts. The programme aims to provide a new mechanism for executing research in our opportunity spaces, advance the UK’s scientific and technological capabilities and give scientists a new avenue to pursue cutting-edge, large-scale research projects in the UK.
> Learn more about FROST UK
Fifty Years
Fifty Years works across our opportunity spaces, delivering its company creation programme 5050 in the UK. 5050 equips scientists and engineers with the necessary skills to start and build world-changing companies that can solve humanity’s greatest challenges. 5050 participants are identifying civilisation-scale problems to tackle, develop essential entrepreneurship skills, grow into great founders, and learn everything they need to commercialise their research. Two 5050 cohorts will run per year to help great scientists and engineers become great founders.
> Hear more from Seth Bannon, founding partner of Fifty Years
Google DeepMind
Google DeepMind will work with us to identify projects designed to accelerate the impact of ARIA-backed research. This will include leveraging its team of multidisciplinary researchers, alongside its broader network, to provide access, insights, and connectivity to researchers, and drive applications within our opportunity spaces.
Google DeepMind’s partnership with ARIA will not include a funded component.
Nucleate UK
Through this partnership with ARIA, Nucleate UK will identify and support top UK scientific talent, helping them engage with the biotech ecosystem and translate cutting-edge research into companies with real-world impact - with a particular focus on ARIA's Programmable Plants opportunity space through Nucleate’s Eco track which supports biotechnologies for sustainability and climate. Programmes such as the Activator – Nucleate’s flagship accelerator – will guide teams through the process of biotech creation. Nucleate is also empowering the next generation of biotech entrepreneurs by building national and global networks to connect scientists with mentors and investors. This partnership will extend to future opportunity spaces, growing communities and supporting founders tackling the UK’s most pressing challenges through science and innovation.
> Learn more about Nucleate
Pillar VC
The Encode: AI for Science Fellowship is a year-long fellowship for top AI researchers tackling high-impact scientific challenges. Backed by Pillar VC and powered by ARIA, fellows are embedded in leading UK labs to apply AI to areas like climate modelling, neuromorphic computing, and robotics. Fellows receive a competitive salary, compute, partnerships, and datasets, and join a vibrant community of scientists, founders, and engineers. Encode Fellows advance frontier research and help launch deep tech ventures and research organisations.
The UK Government has recently announced its intention to fund the expansion of the programme. The new initiative will be backed by the UK Sovereign AI Unit with up to £5 million in government funding.
> Learn more about Encode
Renaissance Philanthropy
As an Activation Partner, Renaissance Philanthropy is running the UK Horizons Programme to act as a force multiplier for ARIA's opportunity spaces. The programme seeks to supercharge the UK's R&D ecosystem by building networks of innovators and increasing their ambition, expanding the diversity of science translation mechanisms, strengthening the UK’s philanthropic ecosystem, and building research translation strategies to increase the scale and impact of ARIA's opportunity spaces.
> Learn more about the UK Horizons Programme
*While some partners will operate in specific opportunity spaces, others will focus on fostering entrepreneurial drive across the entire ARIA ecosystem.
Science entrepreneurship at ARIA
"We’re thinking about how we can best harness entrepreneurial drive to turn breakthroughs from our programmes into tangible impact for the UK, and are exploring mechanisms for what that looks like in practice."
Upcoming events + opportunities
How we work
We seek out exceptional scientists and engineers and empower them to turn their ideas into reality.
Funding opportunities
Learn about how we fund and explore our current and past funding opportunities.