Scaling Trust
Backed by nearly £50m, this programme sits within the Trust Everything, Everywhere opportunity space and is funding the frontier infrastructure and fundamental research for AI agents to coordinate securely on our behalf, across digital and physical worlds.
Our goal
With the capability to coordinate securely, AI agents could act reliably on our behalf, freeing up our time and effort for the activities we find the most meaningful, and unlocking a whole range of economically and socially valuable interactions that were previously inaccessible.
Agents could form productive networks enabling us to achieve collective goals, could participate in verifiable cyber-physical markets, and could use their unique technical attributes to dramatically cut the cost of finding counterparties, negotiating, and enforcing agreements.
We first published the Scaling Trust programme thesis in 2025. As agents begin to be deployed at scale, trust, safety and security have become some of the most important topics in the discourse. We are contributing to this global effort by funding the moonshots that could dramatically change the picture for multi-agentic security.
These initiatives include open-source software accessible to all agentic stacks, new roots of trust anchored in the physical world, new fundamental research that could redefine the design space industry is operating in, and new ways to assess capabilities of multi-agent cyber-physical systems in adversarial settings.
Programme tracks
This programme is split into three mutually reinforcing tracks:
Arena
A platform for open competitions designed to test AI systems’ capabilities in multi-agent coordination across digital and physical worlds, with a multi-million pound prize pool for the strongest teams.
Tooling
Open-source coordination infrastructure usable by all in the Arena and beyond, to steer innovation toward the most meaningful axes of progress.
Fundamental research
Theory that helps move us from empirical to theory-driven guarantees, and that helps us design new security primitives that can aid agentic coordination.
The Scaling Trust Arena
At the core of the programme is the Scaling Trust Arena, a cyber-physical environment for open competitions to test secure agentic coordination.
Take a deep dive into the Arena on our dedicated website.
Explore the funded projects
Meet the Creators who are building the frontier infrastructure and conducting fundamental research for AI agents to coordinate securely across digital and physical worlds.
Join the conversation
The Trust Everything, Everywhere Discord server provides a space for collaboration and discussion amongst ARIA funded projects as well as the wider community, where we encourage members to share insights, ideas, and build in public.
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.
Arutyun Arutyunyan
Programme Specialist
Arutyun joins ARIA having led end-to-end delivery of deep tech programmes across the private and public sector. He has also acted as a fractional Chief of Staff for AI and cybersecurity startups, supporting them with their growth, operational and fundraising strategies. He holds a DPhil in Materials Science from the University of Oxford. Arutyun 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.
Programme discovery
To help guide our thinking and shape the programme’s development, we funded a series of short, exploratory research projects running from December 2025 to February 2026.
Find out more
Sign up for programme updates
Receive the latest updates from this programme, including funding opportunities, programme developments, events, activities and ways to get involved.