Advanced Connectivity Technologies: New Innovators 2026 (Innovate UK Competition 2513): £25,000 to £50,000 at 100 Percent Funding, Reserved for UK Micro and Small Businesses That Have Never Held an Innovate UK Grant — Closing 5 August 2026

Advanced Connectivity Technologies: New Innovators 2026 (Innovate UK Competition 2513): £25,000 to £50,000 at 100 Percent Funding, Reserved for UK Micro and Small Businesses That Have Never Held an Innovate UK Grant — Closing 5 August 2026

Most Innovate UK competitions quietly favour companies that have done it before. The applicants who know how the Innovation Funding Service works, who have a costs spreadsheet already in the right shape, and who have learned which phrases assessors reward, tend to score better than equally good companies filing their first application. Competition 2513 exists to break that pattern. Advanced Connectivity Technologies: New Innovators is open only to UK micro and small businesses that have never received direct funding from Innovate UK before. If you have already held an Innovate UK grant, you are ineligible — and that is the point.

The trade-off for that protected field is a short window and a small cheque. The competition opened on 7 July 2026 and closes at 11:00am UK time on Wednesday 5 August 2026. The total pot is £500,000, and individual grants run from £25,000 to £50,000. At the top of that range, the fund supports roughly ten projects.

What makes it worth the effort is the funding rate. This is a 100 percent grant: your total eligible project costs must equal your grant request, so there is no match funding to find and no cash contribution from your own balance sheet. For a company with three people and a prototype, a fully funded £50,000 six-month project is a meaningful runway extension, not a rounding error.

Key Details

What the Competition Is Actually For

Innovate UK describes the aim as accelerating the development, demonstration and commercialisation of next-generation communications technologies that strengthen UK security and competitiveness. In practice, “advanced connectivity” here means the layer beneath most consumer technology: the networks, the radio spectrum, the hardware and software that move data between places, and the systems that keep all of that running and secure.

Your project must sit inside one of two ACT Grand Challenges.

Challenge 1: Secure and Resilient Networks. This covers work on network reliability, rapid recovery after failure or attack, end-to-end security, defences against emerging threat classes, supply chain integrity, and spectrum security. If your product hardens a network, detects compromise faster, keeps service running through disruption, or reduces dependence on a fragile component supply, this is your challenge.

Challenge 2: Sustainable Networks. This covers reducing the environmental footprint of network operation: energy efficiency in equipment or protocols, more efficient use of spectrum, integrating renewable generation, thermal efficiency and cooling, transport and backhaul improvements, and material efficiency in hardware. Networks consume a great deal of power and a great deal of metal, and both are on national reduction targets.

The framing throughout is “affordable, adoptable and investable.” That phrasing is a strong hint about what assessors want. Affordable means someone can actually buy it. Adoptable means it fits into networks as they are currently built and operated, rather than requiring the world to change first. Investable means there is a route to further capital after this grant runs out. A technically elegant idea that fails any of those three tests will struggle.

Who Is Eligible — and Who Is Firmly Not

The eligibility rules are unusually strict, and several of them are hard fails rather than judgement calls.

You must be a UK registered micro or small business. Innovate UK applies standard company-size definitions based on headcount and turnover or balance sheet totals. Check the exact thresholds in the competition’s eligibility section on the Innovation Funding Service before you invest time — a medium-sized business cannot lead here regardless of the quality of its idea.

Single applicants only. There are no collaborators, no academic partners drawing grant, no consortium. You can buy in expertise through subcontracting within your costs, but the application, the grant, and the accountability all sit with one company.

No previous direct Innovate UK funding. This is the defining restriction. If your company has held an Innovate UK grant before, you are out. There is one carve-out worth knowing: funding an individual received academically, before the company was formed, does not disqualify the company. A founder who was named on a university-held grant during a PhD has not, in this sense, received direct Innovate UK company funding.

No history of non-compliance. An organisation that failed to comply with the terms of a previous grant is ineligible.

Financial limits. Your total project costs must be between £25,000 and £50,000, and your grant request must equal your total project costs exactly. Requesting £45,000 against £52,000 of costs is an automatic ineligibility, not a negotiation. The award must also fit within your Minimal Financial Assistance allowance — currently £315,000 across the applicable three-year rolling period, counting other subsidies you have received.

Territorial rules. The work must be carried out in the UK, the results must be exploited in the UK, and the majority of the funding must be spent in the UK.

What Innovate UK Will Not Fund

The exclusions are explicit and worth reading as a warning about framing.

Projects that produce only a report or an academic paper are out. This competition funds the development of something, not the study of whether something might work. Projects that cannot evidence economic or societal impact, or that do not represent value for money, are out. Primary production in the fisheries, aquaculture and agriculture sectors is excluded. So is anything where the funding is contingent on export performance or on using domestic rather than imported inputs — a subsidy-control requirement rather than a policy preference.

The Application: Structure and Scoring

The application has four parts, and only one of them is scored — which is where most first-time applicants misallocate their effort.

Project details (not scored). Title, start date, duration, a 400-word project summary, a 400-word public description, and a 400-word statement of how the project fits the competition scope. The scope statement is not marked, but it is the gate: if a reviewer decides the project is out of scope, the scored answers never get read. Write it against the two Grand Challenges explicitly and name the one you are addressing.

Application questions (10 background and declaration questions, 4 scored). Questions 1 to 10 gather background and declarations. The marks are in the last four, at 25 points each:

• Question 11 — The Idea (0–25). Define the problem precisely, then explain what is genuinely new about your solution. Assessors are looking for a specific technical or commercial gap, not a general observation that networks should be safer or greener.
• Question 12 — Impact and Added Value (0–25). Business benefit and societal benefit, with evidence. This is where “affordable, adoptable and investable” needs to become concrete: who buys it, at roughly what price, and what changes for them.
• Question 13 — Business Resources and Capabilities (0–25). Can this team actually deliver in three to six months? Name the people, their relevant track record, and any subcontracted capability you are bringing in.
• Question 14 — Work Packages and Costs (0–25). A credible plan with sensible budget allocation and honest risk management. Weak risk sections are one of the most common reasons otherwise strong applications lose marks here.

Finances. Full project costs, organisation details, and funding breakdown, totalling between £25,000 and £50,000.

Project impact (required, not scored). Background information on expected outcomes.

Two mechanical rules catch people out: you cannot include URLs in your answers, and every section must be marked complete before the system will let you submit. You can reopen and resubmit any time before the deadline, so submit a complete draft early and refine it rather than racing the clock at 10:55am.

Assessment, Odds, and the Portfolio Effect

Each application is reviewed by one independent assessor, scoring out of 100. Innovate UK’s own guidance suggests you should expect roughly a 15 percent chance of success based on comparable competitions. That is not unusually harsh for a grant of this size, but it is worth internalising before you commit a week of founder time.

Funding also uses a portfolio approach: Innovate UK deliberately spreads awards across different technologies, markets, themes and geographies. A superb application can lose to a slightly weaker one that adds variety to the funded set. You cannot game this, but it does mean a distinctive angle — an unusual market, an under-represented region, a challenge area with fewer applicants — carries real value.

If scores tie at the budget threshold, the tie-breakers are applied in order: the idea, then impact and added value, then business resources and capabilities, then work plan and costs, then portfolio balance across the UK. Question 11 is, in effect, weighted more heavily than its 25 marks suggest.

One hard truth: no feedback is provided, whether you win or lose. There is no assessor commentary to learn from afterwards. Whatever you want to know about your application’s weaknesses, you need to find out before you submit — from a mentor, an advisor, or someone who has assessed grants before.

Preparation Strategy for a Ten-Day Window

With the deadline on 5 August, the realistic plan is compressed.

Settle eligibility first, in an hour, not a week. Company size, no prior Innovate UK funding, MFA headroom, UK-based delivery. If any of these fail, stop.

Watch the briefing recording. Innovate UK Business Connect hosts the competition briefing recording and slides. For a first-time applicant this is the highest-value hour available — it tends to state plainly what the delivery team wants to see.

Scope your project to the money and the calendar. Three to six months, starting on the first of a month, no earlier than 1 November 2026 and finished by 30 April 2027. A £50,000, six-month project has room for one well-defined technical milestone and a demonstration. It does not have room for a full product. Propose the piece of work that de-risks the next, larger step, and say so.

Build the costs before the prose. Your grant request must equal your total costs exactly, so the number is a constraint on the plan, not an output of it. Work packages, then costs, then narrative.

Complete the Minimal Financial Assistance declaration. This is a required upload, not an optional annex. Chasing it on the final morning is a common and entirely avoidable failure.

Check permits, licences and export controls. Any permits or licences your project needs must be in place by project start. If academic export control licences apply to your work, you must declare it. Projects involving animals must meet UKRI welfare standards.

Common Mistakes

The recurring errors in competitions of this shape are predictable.

Treating the scope statement as boilerplate, when it decides whether your scored answers are read at all. Describing a technology without naming a buyer, which sinks Question 12. Writing a work plan with no risk section worth the name, which sinks Question 14. Proposing a project that is really a feasibility study writing up its findings — remember that reports and papers alone are explicitly not funded. Mismatching costs and grant request, which is an ineligibility rather than a low score. Including URLs in answers, which the rules forbid. And submitting more than one application per business, when only one is allowed.

The subtler mistake is over-claiming. A three-to-six-month, £50,000 project that promises to transform national network security reads as naive. One that promises a working prototype of a specific mechanism, tested against a named scenario, with a named first customer conversation already underway, reads as fundable.

Payment and What Happens After You Win

Applicants are notified on 2 September 2026. Projects can start no earlier than 1 November 2026, must begin on the first of a month, and cannot start before the Grant Offer Letter is approved.

Payment is staged and unusually front-loaded for a UK grant: 50 percent within one month of the project start, 40 percent in arrears once a claim is approved, and the final 10 percent within 10 to 14 days of final claim approval. That first tranche matters for a micro business — it means you are not funding six months of work out of cash flow and waiting to be reimbursed.

Frequently Asked Questions

My co-founder was named on an Innovate UK grant held by their university before we incorporated. Are we out? No. Funding an individual received academically, prior to company formation, does not count as the company having received direct Innovate UK funding. Company-held Innovate UK grants do.

Can I bring in a university partner? Not as a collaborator — this is single-applicant only. You can subcontract specialist work within your project costs, subject to the competition’s subcontracting rules. Check those rules on the Innovation Funding Service before you build a budget around them.

Do I need match funding? No. This is a 100 percent grant. Your total eligible project costs and your grant request must be the same figure.

Can I submit two applications, one per challenge? No. Only one application per eligible business.

Will I get feedback if I am unsuccessful? No. Innovate UK states that no feedback is provided regardless of outcome.

What if I need an adjustment to apply? Reasonable adjustments are available, but contact the support team well before the deadline — late requests limit what can be arranged.

Official Links and Contacts

The UKRI opportunity page is at https://www.ukri.org/opportunity/2513-advanced-connectivity-technologies-new-innovators/, and it links through to the full competition overview and application on the Innovation Funding Service, which is where the authoritative guidance, eligibility detail, subcontracting rules and cost categories live. The briefing recording and slides are hosted by Innovate UK Business Connect.

For support, email [email protected] or call 0300 321 4357. The helpline operates 9am to 12pm and 2pm to 5pm UK time, Monday to Friday, excluding bank holidays. Given the 5 August deadline, any question that could affect your eligibility should go to them in the first few days rather than the final week — the phone lines get busy as competitions close, and the deadline is not moved for applicants who could not get through.

If competition 2513 is not the right fit, it is worth keeping the Advanced Connectivity Technologies programme on your watch list. This New Innovators strand sits alongside larger ACT calls that have run at the £15 million scale for collaborative prototype work, and Innovate UK publishes new rounds on the same UKRI funding finder throughout the year.